by Dave Roberts » Mon Oct 10, 2011 1:43 am
One of the real struggles for women in ministry is the fact that so many churches in the rural and small-town South are plateaued or in decline. Part of that is the demographics as young people leave the communities of their nurture for those places offering better job opportunities. Many of the traditional starting places for ministers simply are not there any more because they cannot support a full-time ministry. The UMC has faced this by combining churches into fields (sometimes in almost unmanageable configurations such as having a clergy couple serving 10 churches between them), but they have kept trained ministers in most of these settings. Baptists are faced with many smaller churches that may not exist at all in another generation. As I look at the area where I live, there are at least 8 to 10 Baptist churches that have little prospect for a continued existence beyond 2025. Small town churches that once had associate pastors have been reduced to having only a pastor in many of them. The competition for today's seminary graduates is increasingly difficult, no matter what the theological stripe. To some extent, I see the SBC's resistance to women as a rear-guard protective action to protect these places of service for men when there may be more able women.
I am convinced that to gain a hearing in Baptist circles, women ministers must be both better preachers and more skilled as people persons than men, and I have met several who definitely are. Some of the men in our world need to listen to the messages these women are bringing and ask, "Could they be speaking a clear message from God?" I'm convinced that some of them definitely are.