Why Some Women Stay in Religious Groups That Don’t Let Them Become Leaders
Originally published by John Blake for CNN
A week after she went on National Public Radio to urge the Southern Baptist Convention to officially accept women as pastors, the Rev. Kristen Muse received an unusual letter at her church office.
The letter, addressed directly to Muse, was stuffed in a large manila envelope along with three pages of scriptural references. The writer asked Muse how she could call herself a pastor when the Apostle Paul said that “I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; she must be silent” in 1 Timothy 2:11-12. And, by the way, why was she wearing her hair long in church when the Bible clearly states that women should cover their heads or wear their hair short during worship?
Muse then looked closer at the signature at the bottom of the letter: It was a woman’s name.
“It hurt,” says Muse, the executive pastor of Hayes Barton Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her church is considering leaving the SBC because the denomination’s statement of faith declares that “the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by scripture.”
“It hurts even more to know that’s a woman is saying that,” adds Muse, whose congregation has skirted the ban on women pastors because the SBC has traditionally allowed individual congregations some autonomy (her church is headed by a male senior pastor). “I just wonder how long her hair is.”
Here’s another question the letter writer would not have dared ask:
Why do millions of women belong to religious groups like the SBC that do not treat them as equal to men or allow them to have full control of their bodies?
Women in some churches face a ‘stained glass ceiling’
The question is worth asking now because the debate over women clergy has resurfaced since the SBC – the US’ largest Protestant denomination, with about 13 million members – made two highly publicized recent decisions involving women.
First, its “messengers,” or lay representatives, voted at their annual meeting last month to adopt a resolution declaring the SBC’s opposition to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a popular fertility treatment used by couples who cannot naturally conceive.
And second, members voted down an amendment that would “clarify that the SBC only cooperates with churches that do not affirm, appoint or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.”
That move, though, may only be temporary. The SBC has already expelled at least three churches, including one this year, for affirming female pastors. And the Rev. Clint Pressley, its newly elected president, supported the amendment.