Several years ago when I was serving as a Baptist Press correspondent from the site of the Baptist Women in Ministry gathering, I noticed a glaring absence in a room of moderate-to-liberal Baptist women committed to women in the pastorate. The absence was women who were actually serving in the pastorate. I commented at the time to a colleague there with me that if an alien spacecraft were to abduct the gathering, there would hardly be a hospital chaplain left in the Southeast. Clinical Pastoral Education-licensed chaplains were there in large numbers, as were counselors and various other church staff positions. But pastors were few and far between.
Today Albert Mohler looks at the hard data and concludes that Baptists across the spectrum don’t disagree on women in the pastorate. They disagree on the idea of women in the pastorate. But the research of two Baptist feminists shows that moderate and liberal Baptist churches just don’t call women as pastors either in great numbers, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary.
I’m not sure how to account for this trend among the feminist-friendly Baptists, although I have an idea or two. I wonder how egalitarian Baptist tendencies here compare with other communions committed to the idea of women clergy, especially among those bodies in which, like Baptists, congregations themselves (rather than a bishop or presbytery) choose the pastor of each church?
