An Old Landmark Reset

The series on Evangelical Singleness will return when I can find some time to get those articles into a presentable form. They are all outlined... I just need to flesh them out. In the meantime, I need to atone for some sins. I get the feeling that this blog is simply a matter of me speaking to myself on the internet. Even if that's the case, there is something I need to get off my chest.

Seminary was not easy for me. I attended a seminary that was born as a result of a denominational struggle, whose faculty were almost all victims of the purge of Southern Baptist seminaries in the early 90s. When I arrived at McAfee in the fall of 2002, the pain was still palpable in the air, and not just from the faculty: many students had inherited the conflict from faculties of denominational colleges.

For me and others like me, that is, men, my affiliation with the moderate wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, a group that was soundly defeated when I was just a kid, was mostly a personal theological preference. For the women of our seminary, however, identification with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship was more. It had to be more. For them, the difference between a lifetime of Christian ministry and a lifetime of missed opportunities hung in the balance. That some students were "moderates" because of personal preference and others were "moderates" because of existential need created an incredible amount of friction. In the midst of some conversations that certainly don't need to be aired on the World Wide Web, the fact that we all shared the same fundamental convictions about the nature of the Baptist witness was badly obscured.

I'm ashamed to admit that my own convictions were, to some extent, obscured even to myself. But this evening, as I thought back on some of these things, I realized that, for the first time in years, I was angry that Baptists in the South have kept women out of positions of church leadership. I was angry that we affirm that baptism makes a person a priest and a minister, but refuse to admit that it works on women, too. I was angry about the selectivity of "verbal inerrancy" through which women are allowed to teach children and sing in the choir, but never preach. I was angry that I Timothy 3 is used as a bludgeon to keep women quiet when so few pastors I know are really up to the standards that are recorded there. It's not about feminism. It's about exegesis. The spirit has been poured out on all flesh.

I admit that seeing a woman in the pulpit still makes me uncomfortable. But I am willing to bear that discomfort to press forward to the better future that is waiting for us.