This is what a minister looks like: The expanding Baptist definition of minister

On Friday, September 12, 2014, Baptist Women in Ministry (BWIM) launched a new blog series titled “This is What a Minister Looks Like.” Each post features an interview with a Baptist woman minister as well as a photo of the minister. By the end of 2017, BWIM will have posted 171 interviews, introducing and highlighting the ministry journeys and current places of service of women ministers.

The purpose of the blog series is twofold. First, “This is What a Minister Looks Like” serves as a visual encouragement for women and all church leaders, providing them with an opportunity to “see” and to “meet” women who are serving, leading, preaching, and teaching. Second, “This is What a Minister Looks Like” broadens the often narrow Baptist vision of ministry. Ministry in 2017 is no longer limited to men, nor is it restricted to one church position: the pastor. Ministry is no longer even confined to positions within the church. The Baptist vision of ministry has expanded greatly, and this BWIM blog series recognizes and promotes all the many ways and places that ministry is currently happening, and encourages congregations, ministers, and lay members to see the beautiful and creative variety of ministries of Baptist women. These blogs stretch the imaginations of Baptists when it comes to defining ministry.

In recent years, more and more Baptists have begun officially recognizing, ordaining, and calling women as ministers, but this shift toward women ministers has been part of and has influenced the wider expansion and redefinition of ministerial identity. Historically, Baptists have defined “minister” as one who has been called to vocational ministry, and they have understood that calling as a two-fold process, involving divine and human elements. God calls the individual, and a community of faith affirms that call. Baptist communities since the 1650s have affirmed, set apart, and ordained persons who have received such a call to ministry from God. ¹ Throughout most of their four-hundred-year history, however, Baptists have limited ordination to men who felt a call to preach; thus, minister and preacher have generally been synonymous.

In the 1870s, Baptist pastor G. S. Bailey wrote a pamphlet titled A Call to the Ministry, in which he stated, “There is a divinely appointed and divinely called ministry … [to which] the Saviour [sic] called men specially to preach the Gospel.” ² In a 1958 article titled “Minister” for the Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, Dotson M. Nelson Jr. indicated that, in his understanding, preacher and minister were one and the same. In the concluding sentence of his article, he proclaimed, “The Southern Baptist preacher—called of God, depending on the Holy Spirit, seeking always new light, ever an evangelist, continually a promoter of the program—is sometimes frustrated by the size of his task, yet generally is determined to do it to the best of his ability.” ³ Bailey’s pamphlet reflected the understanding held by most Baptists in the United States during the nineteenth century that the minister was the preacher. Nelson’s statement confirmed that this understanding of minister continued to be the commonly-held belief of many Southern Baptists until the mid-twentieth century.

Yet a gradual shift had begun to happen in Baptist circles. In his recent book, Fundamentalism, Fundraising, and the Transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1919–1925, Andrew Smith noted that in the early twentieth century, “Southern Baptists were beginning to image a number of new professions that fell within the scope of full-time religious work.” ⁴ Smith cited the writings of W. T. Connor, a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, who in 1923 wrote:

We no longer consider that the ministry is the only line in which a man can devote himself to special religious work … We are seeing that a man may give himself to religious work without being an ordained preacher. There is a great field opening up for men to give themselves to educational work in the churches, to Gospel music, church secretary work, and other lines. These people need to be trained for this work. This calls for separate schools to give them training. ⁵

Connor’s vision for broadening the curriculum in seminaries and expanding the opportunities in churches and in religious work recognized a need that already existed. In the latter part of the nineteenth-century, large, urban churches had begun hiring new staff members to oversee various programs and ministries, including religious education, music, and visitation. Most of these new church hires were men, were not ordained, and were considered to be overseers of church programs, as is indicated by the oft-used title “director.” Some churches during these years also hired women and assigned them titles such as “Bible women” or “local missionary.” These women were responsible for visiting non-members, reporting on the material needs of people, supervising mission Sunday Schools, and counseling women. ⁶ First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, had “Bible women” on its church staff from 1887 until 1906. While the church paid these women, they were not considered to be ministers, nor were they ordained. ⁷ In the early twentieth century, with few exceptions, Baptist churches continued to use the title minister and to confer ordination solely on male pastor-preachers, and Connor certainly gave no indication that these new religious workers were to be thought of or treated as ordained ministers of the gospel.

During the mid-twentieth century, the definition of minister within the larger Christian community in the United States gradually evolved to include more than just the pastoral office. In 1956, H. Richard Niebuhr and Daniel D. Williams edited a collection of essays, The Ministry in Historical Perspectives. In their introduction, they commented on the shift that was then occurring with regard to the understanding of ministry and ministers. They asserted, “There is the astonishing adaptability and variety of the ministerial office along with the maintenance of its unity of purpose and dedication. The very word ‘minister’ poses the problem of the variety while it affirms the underlying unity.” ⁸ Niebuhr and Williams then noted that to the traditional definition of minister must be added these “ministerial functions: teacher, chaplain, missionary, evangelist, counselor, and in our day of complex church organizations, secretaries, and directors of councils of churches, social action commissions, and countless others. The plethora of offices exhibits the capacity of the church to adjust to new demands, and yet to hold to the core universal loyalty and function implied in all ministry.” ⁹

What Niebuhr and Williams observed as happening within American churches in general was also true within Baptist churches. Beginning sometime around mid-century, more and more Baptist churches, not just large, urban churches, hired staff members to lead and plan their music programs; to work with preschoolers, children, teenagers, college students, and senior adults; and to oversee administration, education, and recreational activities. Bill Stancil attributed this growing use of multiple ministries by Baptists to the growing size and affluence of Baptist churches. ¹⁰ Around the 1970s, some Baptist churches recognized and publicly identified these staff members as ministers and began ordaining them. In 1979, Leon McBeth called attention to this “recent proliferation of ordination for the non-preaching ministry.” ¹¹ A 1986 survey confirmed this growing phenomenon, noting that of 326 ministers of education in Southern Baptist churches 77 percent of them were ordained. ¹² In addition to ordaining non-preaching staff members, some Baptist churches, according to Stancil, also began ordaining persons called to “a wide range of ministries that are not, strictly speaking, oriented to the local church.” ¹³ For example, some Baptist churches ordained chaplains, seminary professors, and denominational leaders in the 1970s and 1980s.

Included in those ordained in this time period were women, and thus began heated ordination debates among Baptists. ¹⁴ Some Baptists affirmed women’s ordination, including the American Baptist Convention, which in 1965 adopted a resolution that affirmed the equality of women and advocated for the ordination of women. ¹⁵ From its founding in 1987, the Alliance of Baptists affirmed women as ministers and celebrated their ordination. Likewise, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, organized in 1991, in its founding documents affirmed women’s ordination. The Conference of Seventh Day Baptists, in their 2004 Manual of Procedures, affirmed that the call of God leads both “men and women to dedicate themselves to professional ministry.” ¹⁶ This Conference, however, left the decision of ordination and pastoral call to the local church and issued no statement on ordination, but several women have served as pastors within the denomination. ¹⁷

Other Baptists were less affirming. In 1984, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) stated its opposition to the ordination of women in a resolution titled “On Ordination and the Role of Women in Ministry,” which was approved by 58 percent of those voting at the convention. ¹⁸ In 2000, the SBC revised its confessional statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message, to contain a clear denouncement of women’s ordination and service as pastors: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” ¹⁹

The National Free Will Baptists also were reluctant to allow women to serve in ordained ministry positions. According to Free Will Baptist pastor, J. Matthew Pinson, some associations have ordained women, but most associations disagree with this practice. ²⁰ Some Landmark Baptists were more adamant in their opposition to female pastors. Wayne Camp asserted: “When it comes to women preachers I think that any church that has women preach in their services are at best very irregular and unbiblical. At worst, they are plainly heretical. I believe it is even wrong for a woman to say ‘Amen’ in a public worship service. I am not alone in that position.” ²¹

African American Baptist denominations traditionally have opposed ordaining women as pastors or ministers. In the 1990s, the various national African American groups displayed little enthusiasm for the ordination of women. A survey revealed that 57 percent of Progressive National Baptist pastors and 74 percent of National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., pastors opposed female ordination. ²²

Given the expanding definition of minister by many Baptists as well as the mixed reviews as to whether women should or should not be ordained, the question that comes to mind is this: how did the presence of called and gifted Baptist women influence the changing Baptist understanding of what a minister looks like, what qualifies one to be a minister, and ordination practices.

For many years, Sarah Frances Anders was the collector of Southern Baptist women’s ordination information. She began that work when Baptist Women in Ministry was founded in 1983 and continued for about twenty years, keeping handwritten index cards in a filing box. ²³ In 2005, BWIM issued its first State of Women in Baptist Life report, which included statistics and information with regard to Baptist women’s ordination and ministry service. ²⁴ As of 2017, five reports have been issued by the organization. This research, however, has highlighted only Baptist denominations and conventions within the progressive-to-moderate circles, many of which broke away from the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s and 1990s. The information collected by BWIM has not included statistics from the American, National, Progressive, Seventh Day, or Free Will Baptists, but has centered itself in churches affiliated with the Alliance of Baptists, the Baptist General Association of Virginia, the Baptist General Convention of Texas, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and, more recently, the District of Columbia Baptist Convention. ²⁵

Because Baptists have no clearinghouse to which they accurately report ordinations of men or women, much of the BWIM research was done checking Baptist news sites, watching for ordination postings on Facebook and other Social Media sites, and sending annual emails to the above-mentioned denominations. The numbers collected are in no way complete for there are ordinations of women each year that go unnoticed and unreported. Nonetheless, based on Anders’ work, the research done by the BWIM staff, and some good Baptist guesswork, ordination numbers by year are as shown in Table 1.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Numbers of Baptist women being ordained.

Year	Total ordinations
1964	1
1978	50
1986	232
1993	1,000
1997	1,225
2005	2,000
2015	2,433

According to Anders’ research, there was a significant increase in the number of women ordained in the late 1980s and 1990s. Many of the 1,000 women ordained by 1997 were serving as chaplains—in hospitals, hospices, the military, and prisons, and thus McBeth’s words rang true. There had been a “recent proliferation of ordination for the non-preaching ministry.”

In the last few decades of the twentieth century, Baptists were not only ordaining women, but a few Baptist churches began calling women as pastors. In 1971, one Southern Baptist woman was serving as pastor: unordained Ruby Welsh Wilkins was pastor of Antioch Baptist Church in Wadley, Alabama—a small, rural church that she served for thirteen years. Twelve years later, in 1983, fourteen women were pastoring Baptist churches in the South. The number of women pastors in 1993 was fifty-one. In 2005, when the BWIM released its first State of Women in Baptist Life report, the list of women pastors called by moderate-to-progressive Baptist congregations had grown to 102. ²⁶ That number has continued to grow, and in September 2017, the list had the names of 189 women pastors.

The question remains: how did the presence of Baptist women ministers influence the Baptist understanding of what a minister looks like, who qualifies as a minister, and ordination practices. In other words, can a conclusive case be made that the increasing number of women answering the call to ministry and being ordained influenced the “proliferation of non-preaching ordinations” in Baptist life? Did the entrance of more Baptist women into ministry circles broaden the Baptist definition of minister and expand the Baptist imagination of “what a minister looks like?”

Clearly, the number of ordained Baptist women increased significantly in the 1980s and 1990s, and the number of recognized ministry positions both inside and outside the church also increased significantly in this same time period. Women were obviously beneficiaries of the trend of ordaining as ministers those serving in positions other than pastor-preacher, or perhaps women were leading the way and were trendsetters for Baptists. Information is not available about the number of Baptist male ministers ordained for non-preaching roles in this same time period, and thus, it is hard, if not impossible, to establish which came first—an openness to the ordination of women or an openness to ordain ministers beyond just preachers. Nevertheless, either way, Baptist women were in the mix in this move toward the broader definition of minister.