04-18-24

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
April 18, 2024
James Seymour, the Chair of our Elders, will see a book at a used book sale and send me a text asking if I would be interested. One of those books is written by David Gushee, entitled Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism. It has been an interesting read, basically an autobiography within the historical takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and Seminaries by Fundamentalism and the Radical Religious Right. In the middle of the book, I came across a name I knew well, Dr. Molly Marshall. When I was in Kansas City, I did a lot of work with Central Baptist Seminary, a moderate American Baptist Seminary. When Molly was named president in the mid-90s, it was quite controversial, yet she was celebrated by many of us in more progressive circles.

In the book, Gushee writes about his time at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where Marshall had been a professor for eleven years but was forced out in 1994 by those who were opposed to women in ministry or any sort of leadership. Gushee writes in his book,

My journals reveal that I knew from the very beginning that the women’s issue could be a deal-breaker for me and that my integrity would be tested on it. Before I even taught my first class, I wrote: “Women in pastoral roles. That issue—if I won’t change and if Mohler (the president of the seminary)  won’t accept a difference on it—will sink my future at SBTS” (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY). And then one week after starting my teaching at Southern, I wrote this: “What is the issue today that needs a clear, biblical, prophetic word, just like racism needed in 1953 or 1963 or 1863? I think that issue is the full equality of women. Help me, Lord, to lie prostrate before you and speak the truth in good conscience, consequences be damned.” When later that year Molly Marshall was forced out of Southern, I did nothing to stand up for her besides complain to my journal.

How many of us, when the risk is low, can make pretty dramatic statements of our faith and think to ourselves just how far we would be willing to go, but then when the risk is real and the threat has implications in regard to our standing in society, our bank account, or certain friendships, are quick to complain ever-so-quietly to our journal or to God in prayer? Yet no one else knows our opinion on the topic.

At Cypress Creek Christian Church, we have moved beyond the question of women in ministry, though sadly, we are confronted on a fairly regular basis by those who want to tell us why we are wrong. Putting that aside, where are those places of faithfulness today where we are decrying the injustice in the privacy of our journal or in a safe group of like-minded people? Where are our life choices suggesting some insecurity around the unconditional and unrelenting love of God? Where are we choosing silence, even though we know that silence is choosing to be complicit with the very thing we find to be in opposition to the love, compassion, and justice in the life and teachings of Jesus?

Later in the chapter, Gushee referenced another journal entry, a sort of prayer…

I realize… how much of a hit my integrity—and my joy—have taken under the oppression of this place (SBTS). I have bent to make it work. But your Word speaks words of simple truth—maintain justice, tell the truth, do what is right.

Maybe that’s our prayer today…

Holy God, may the Living Word continue to challenge me to maintain justice, tell the truth, and do what is right. Amen.