Calls to 'Get the woman out of the pulpit' aren't quite as loud | Opinion
"Get the woman out of the pulpit." A church member had scrawled the words on the pew registration pad. As the college-aged, part-time summer receptionist at my church, I answered the phone, made copies, did filing and, on Monday mornings, went through the registration pads. I didn’t have to wonder for whom that sentiment was intended, because I had given the sermon the day before.
It wasn’t my first time in the pulpit of First Christian Church in Lubbock, Texas, in the early 1980s. That was two summers earlier, on Senior Sunday, when I’d been about to graduate high school. I wasn’t the first woman in the pulpit even then. But first times and frequency don’t guarantee change. Barriers like this one don’t get broken once; they get broken over time.
I was in the pulpit because the male summer ministerial intern opted out of preaching at the last minute. He’d spent weeks writing his sermon. Despite being employed full time, he did little else but sermon prep. He even asked me, as the receptionist, to bring him coffee. And then, on the Friday before he was supposed to fill the pulpit, he told the senior minister that he wouldn’t be able to preach.
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“I’ll do it,” I said. I wrote a sermon and delivered it in less that 48 hours, which I assumed most preachers did every week. My congregation was kind and supportive when they shook my hand after the service. I had known since high school church camp that I was called to ministry, but I was still learning what that meant. I knew my journey as a woman in ministry would be tough. I was grateful for the women and men of my home congregation who had loved and supported me from the moment my mother put me in the nursery. For two decades, they had been showing me about the love of God in Jesus Christ.
"Get the woman out of the pulpit." It wasn’t the last time I would encounter those words. Now my sisters in more evangelical churches have run quite publicly into their equivalent. I’ve been an ordained minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ for more than 30 years. I’ve always had a bird’s-eye view of the stained-glass ceiling. But God has led me to amazing congregations to serve as an associate minister. Funnily enough, I never felt a strong call to preach. I have been more called to Christian education and pastoral care. But lately, I’ve felt a shift in my call. I think, after more than three decades, I might be ready to preach on a regular basis.
"Get the woman out of the pulpit." Sadly, the folks who most need the ministry of women are the very ones who deny it. Some cite scripture to deny women’s call to ministry. I invite them to a more complex conversation about biblical interpretation and authority, and to weigh those few passages against the whole of Scripture. Some say women can’t be effective leaders over men. I invite them to listen to my stories about men’s lives that, by the grace of God, I have had a part in transforming. Some say women are too emotional to serve as pastors. I say that women are emotionally nimble and grounded in the same measure that men are.
I welcome my sisters from the evangelical churches to their new day. It was my tradition’s new day once. I wanted to let you know that things haven’t gotten easier, but they have gotten better.
There’s a woman in the pulpit.
Praise the Lord.
The Rev. Beth Pattillo is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and is located in Nashville.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Opinion: Calls to 'Get the woman out of the pulpit' aren't as loud
