I’m as Baptist as they come. I grew up in an ol’ school Baptist church (not fundamentalist, but very conservative and flirting with legalism). I went to a Baptist undergrad and even studied Baptist History. I have a shelf full of Baptist history books. I served as a missionary for a year and a half with NAMB (SBC). I was a Baptist Student Ministry director for 5 years, and 2 prior as assistant. I worked for the state convention in their Baptist archives. I was super involved in my local Baptist church. I am (was?) Baptist.
In some ways I still consider myself a Baptist – in large part because it was such a key part of my spiritual life for so long. But I have realized that there’s not exactly a home for me in the Baptist world anymore. And there hasn’t really been a place for me there for the past twenty years — I’ve just been stubborn and kept making a place for myself (with the help of some great people on the inside).
I’ve never been okay with the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message and it’s statement on women. Even when I was still a complementarian I had major issues with it. At my former church, before I joined I had a long conversation with my pastor. In that conversation I told him that though the church holds to the 2000 BF&M I don’t. He didn’t care. He had actually inherited that aspect of the church and wasn’t too keen on it either (though for different reasons).
Then things changed at my church. That pastor moved away and we had a new pastor. After several years, things began to change. He – and the other pastors – began to double down on a stricter form of complementarianism. It’s a long messy story – but it ends with me battered and bruised, limping away from that chuch with my head held high.
They said they wanted me to stay. But to stay I would have had to sacrifice my integrity – and my giftings. If I stayed, I would have been their token theologian & hebraist, their walking seminary, but kept chained to the sidelines.
In short, though I felt a strong call and desire to work with discipleship within the church, (I wanted to equip people to disciple one another.) and though the pastor affirmed my giftings in that area – he would not let me serve the people in that area. Oh, I could write the curriculum with my fingers (strange since I wasn’t advocating a curriculum based approached), but I could not use my vocal chords to teach the information to the men of the church. Rather, he would use his male vocal chords to vocalize my teachings.
The other pastor, however, looked me in my eyes and told me that he would only let me work with the women of the church; but I could not work with the men of the church because he “wasn’t sure [I] loved the church.” Let’s just say you haven’t really lived until you’ve had a pastor look you in the eye and accuse you of not loving the church….all because you dared point out the needs in the church. Well, that, and because of my gender. Why else would he say that I could work with women even though he accused me of not loving the church?
I left that church at the beginning of 2019. And leaving hurt deeply. I loved that church, but the church no longer loved me. I struggled after that to find a church community. I thought I found one shortly before Covid hit. But, well… that’s another story for another time.
Lately I’ve been attending an Anglican church in a diocese that welcomes women as priests. The specific church I’m at has both male and female priests. While I’m still struggling with the paedobaptism of the Anglican theology, I have realized that some things are more important than a credobaptist only theology.
As I sit there on Sundays with my ecclesiastical bruises still causing random stabs of pain, and I see male and female priests serving together the bruises begin to fade. To see men in leadership who aren’t threatened by the mere presence of a woman. To see men willinging learning from their sisters in Christ who share in the preaching. To see a woman mediating the eucharist. To one week receive communion from a female priest, and the next from a male priest. All of this is a balm to my soul — my perhaps no longer Baptist soul.
**Yes, I know there are non-SBC Baptist churches. I don’t fit there either. There’s much more to my Baptist past and church search than is reflected in this post.
JoAnna Hoyt 