ken wilson online

It happened again a few nights ago.  A news story on ABC World News Tonight.  Lead in video montage of a woman with eyes closed and hands raised in worship, cut to a group of three Southern Baptists standing outside of a SBC seminary: a white man, a youngish woman and a youngish African American man, all dressed up as if for church.  So they were trying to put a positive face on these Southern Baptists. The interviewer asked them all: “Do you think Sarah Palin is ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?”  They all nodded enthusiastically.  Then the follow up: “How would you feel about a woman serving as a pastor?” They all frowned and shook their head, no.  Somehow, according to their reading of the Bible, it was just fine for a woman to command the most powerful military the world has ever known, with a enough firepower to wipe out humankind, but it was not fine, and decidedly so, for a woman to pastor a church.  Despite Deborah, despite Priscilla, despite a woman being first witness to the risen Jesus, commissioned by him to take the message of his rising back to the other apostles, making her the apostle to the apostles. Throwing his lot and the lot of his religion in with a woman from the get go–entrusting her with the most authoritative message ever delivered by a member of humankind to humankind.

The views of the three Southern Baptists are representative of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, second in size only to Roman Catholicism (which similarly prohibits women from serving as pastors), and more to my point, the church home of the leading evangelical of our time, Billy Graham.  I ask you, if you were a thoughtful and inquiring young woman who had not been raised with any particular Christian convictions, how would you feel about attending an evangelical church in the hopes of learning more about the founder of Christianity?   Houston, we have a problem. 
Read the rest of this entry »