There are roughly 500 Southern Baptist churches in the Pacific Northwest, accounting for more than 44,000 members. At its annual meeting last month, the Southern Baptist Convention considered an amendment to ban women from being pastors. It ultimately didn’t meet the two-thirds majority it needed to pass, but it still had support from more than 60% of delegates. At the same meeting, delegates passed a resolution opposing the use of in vitro fertilization.
Susan Shaw is an ordained Southern Baptist minister and a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Oregon State University. She joins us to talk more about these changes and the role of women in the church.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. At its annual meeting last month, the Southern Baptist Convention considered an amendment to ban women from being pastors. The ban did not pass but only because it narrowly missed the two-thirds majority it needed. Susan Shaw was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister. She is also a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Oregon State University, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Susan Shaw: Thanks, Dave. It’s good to be here.
Miller: There are around 440 Southern Baptist affiliated churches in the Northwest, which sounds like a big number, but there are over 7,000 churches combined in Georgia and North Carolina. Almost 2.5 million members in Texas alone. How significant a cultural force is a Southern Baptist church in the South?
Shaw: Well, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest protestant denomination in the country and it’s largely concentrated in the South, which means it has a lot of political power there.
Miller: What did the church mean to you when you were growing up?
Shaw: Well, I grew up a fundamentalist Southern Baptist. And so the language we always use, I was there every time the doors were open – Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, youth activities, you name it. And so it was really central in my growing up years to be in a Southern Baptist Church. So I really grew up within that worldview.
Miller: Why did you seek to be ordained as a minister?
Shaw: I grew up in churches that did not ordain women and were very opposed to it. And then I went to seminary thinking I would work in educational ministries in the denomination. There, I began to hear women preach and they were really good at it. I began to do deeper study within the Bible and within theology, and I came to the conviction that women were indeed called to ministry and to ordination.
I discovered that I really wanted to be a college professor and so started my teaching career teaching religious studies in a little Baptist college in California. And I couldn’t be ordained there because I would have been fired. But then I moved to the Northwest to teach religion at what was then George Fox College. While there, I realized that all of my Quaker colleagues had been recorded, which is the official sanctioning of the Northwest yearly meeting.
At that point, I decided that what I was saying to young women, but not by being the only woman on the faculty and by not being ordained, was limiting. And I felt a strong call to that, to some of the things that ordination allows you to do within my tradition such as performing weddings and doing funerals and really preaching, serving communion. And I really felt a sense of calling to those things.
Miller: Do you consider yourself to be a member of the Southern Baptist Convention or churches now?
Shaw: Now, I refer to myself as a Southern Baptist in exile in the United Church of Christ. So I left Southern Baptist in the nineties when they amended their constitution to exclude congregations that accept sexual diversity. I’ve been in the United Church of Christ, which is the most progressive denomination in the country ever since.
Miller: How has this convention, this collection of churches, evolved over the course of just your life?
Shaw: Well, Baptists have always been a very diverse group of people, Southern Baptists as well. So from the beginning, we fought about things and the churches were held together by a common commitment to giving money through the cooperative program to support ministries that churches couldn’t do alone. A lot of that we were sending missionaries, it was publishing, it was educating in the seminaries.
While they were spats, it had not come to the sort of head that it did in the 1980s after the fundamentalists within the domination started a concerted effort to take over. And they did that across about 12-13 years. The moderates and progressives left and formed what became the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Alliance of Baptists. Then the fundamentalist and ultraconservatives stayed, and now they tend to fight each other because that’s one of the characteristics I think of fundamentalism is – its need to define itself ever more narrowly against the beliefs of others.
Miller: Well, how much variation is there right now among the different churches that remain that are all affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention?
Shaw: You know, there’s still some difference because we saw just last year, there was still a church in Kentucky that had a woman as its senior pastor. This year they kicked out a church that is in Alexandria, Virginia that had a woman pastor on its staff. She wasn’t the senior pastor, but the church affirmed that women could serve in any role. And so those churches have still been there, but now they’re getting kicked out.
Miller: What does it mean to be kicked out?
Shaw: Well, they would use the term that they are deemed no longer to be in friendly cooperation. And that means then that they are not welcome to participate in the convention, the annual meeting where they vote on resolutions and on the governing of the denomination. But Southern Baptists are not a hierarchical organization and so the churches are not governed by the convention. They’re all self-governing and autonomous anyway. So in some ways, I mean, they can continue to function as they always did even after they’re no longer part of the Southern Baptist Convention. They just don’t have the same participation in the decisions of the convention as an administrative unit.
Miller: I’m curious what most stood out to you in the relatively close vote this year to officially ban women from being pastors. As I noted, it needed two-thirds of the members, delegates voting to approve it, and it got something like 61 or 62%. What did that tell you?
Shaw: Well, it certainly is not an instance of Southern Baptists changing their minds about women. A lot of the messengers argued that we didn’t need that because the convention had already taken the steps necessary. So they’re already booting out churches last year. They booted out Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, which was the largest church in the convention at that time. They passed a resolution in 1984 that said that only men should be pastors. And then they affirmed that again in the denomination’s 2000 statement of faith called the Baptists Faith and Message. And those things don’t govern local churches, but they do govern the conventions, agencies and the convention itself. So those are the things that have been used to kick these churches out.
It also told me that Baptists still hold on to what’s called the autonomy of the local church or the idea that the local church is independent. And I think there are about 1,800 to 2,000 women serving as some kind of pastor in Southern Baptist churches. And that probably just felt like a bridge too far in infringing on what local churches can do, to suggest we were going to remove all of the churches that had women in any kind of pastoral role.
Miller: Interesting. So maybe the stronger feeling there was, “don’t tell us what to do,” as opposed to “we think women should be leaders in this church”?
Shaw: Absolutely. I would say most of those, if not all of those who voted against the amendment, still don’t think women should be senior pastors.
Miller: Delegates, as listeners may remember, also passed a resolution opposing the use of IVF (in vitro fertilization). How has the church’s stance on family planning, reproductive health, evolved over the years?
Shaw: Well, if you go back into the 1970s, the denomination really affirmed its belief in the individual conscience. And so in terms of abortion, for example, the convention opposed the idea of abortion on demand, but then they softened that by saying that we still think this is a decision that should be made between a woman and her health care provider. At that point, if you look at the convention’s materials, it talks about fetal life.
As the fundamentalists began to take over the eighties, you saw the resolutions and the materials coming out of the convention became very anti-choice. They began to refer to fetuses as persons. And in fact, in this IVF conversation, they’ve begun to talk about fetuses as human beings. And so they talk about human life. So there’s been a real shift from this notion of the government needing to stay out of women’s personal health choices to we want to encourage the government absolutely to control women’s reproductive possibilities.
Miller: What would you like to see the convention focus on, as opposed to these issues such as banning women from being pastors?
Shaw: Well, I would like to see them focus on doing good in the world, of being a witness for justice and peace and love and all those things that I actually learned about in my little fundamentalist Southern Baptist Church. And so I think there’s a real need for Southern Baptists to take a look at who they’ve become and how that doesn’t sit very well with this sort of history of who the denomination had been for a while there.
Miller: Susan Shaw, thanks very much.
Shaw: Thank you.
Miller: Susan Shaw is a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Oregon State University. She was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister.
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