by Sandy » Fri Jul 19, 2019 10:26 pm
I'm afraid I don't get the "golden parachute" deals that are given out in cases like this. The newspaper reports don't give specifics, but salary negotiations for a new contract weren't headed where she wanted prior to the incident at the sex toy store in Minnesota. Perhaps the church leadership didn't think she warranted a $100,000 raise and I'd have to agree with that in principle. I can't think of a scenario that would warrant that big of a raise in a church pastorate. That's a third of what she was already earning.
She made a bad choice, going to a sex toy shop with church members and staff members. I know she has been an icon of the moderate-to-liberal Baptists as one of the early female pastors in what was at the time an SBC pulpit at Calvary DC, and Riverside is a liberal church, but this was a mistake made in poor judgement if the Post's description of it is accurate. That has to be disappointing to some of her supporters.
Pastoring churches is not easy and I think that many of the women who emerged from the SBC and moved forward to pastor more moderate to liberal congregations were pretty idealistic at the outset, but have met with the same quagmire of issues that is part of church life, second guessing their own leadership decisions, content of sermons and watching out for events, issues and personal feelings of congregants that can turn south in a hurry. In some cases, issues became more complicated because they were women pastors in idealistic, progressive churches that had no real system of support for them as women, and no real precedent for dealing with those same kinds of problems. Several of those high profile individuals, Amy Butler among them, have been in situations that did not turn out well and which were more complicated because of their gender.