Pastor Julie
By Amanda K. Brown, Atlanta Magazine
“A look at Julie Pennington-Russell’s education, experience, and related qualifications would appear to qualify her for a major pulpit . . .except for the fact that she is a woman.” And that’s just what one of her critics—a fellow Southern Baptist—said.
So is Pastor Julie a jezebel or just following Jesus?
Picketers, nearly thirty of them, brandished their beliefs on handmade signs and crowded the entrance to Waco’s seventy-year-old Calvary Baptist Church. They were the same group of fundamentalists who hopped a bus from East Texas to wherever God Said Ministries called them: to Little Rock, Arkansas, to rebuke the church that accepted Bill Clinton; to Stephen F. Austin State University to condemn women’s basketball. The same group whose leader, the Reverend W.N. Otwell, believed men should reign over women and mankind should be split by color.
They were here for God. They were here for the news cameras. They were here for her. She had been nervous the night before. But now, as she, her husband, Tim, and their children, Taylor and Lucy, hurried past the sweaty, shouting men, Julie Pennington-Russell was calm. Peaceful. If anything, the picketers just added to the electricity of this day. The Lord’s Day. Her first day at Calvary as senior pastor.
The vote to bring her here had not been unanimous: 190 to 73. But those young and old who believed calling a woman went against God’s word gave this thirty-seven-year-old minister the greatest gift of all: They left before she arrived. Now those who really wanted her were waiting. Now it was time to get down to the business of being a church. Of loving God. She was so called.
But first, a few more feet.
A few more feet until she would reach the white wooden pulpit, behind which she would remain for the next nine years, and preach a message of change.
Women have no authority!
A few more feet until she would step in front of Calvary’s choir, her cream jacket and sandy blond pixie haircut crisp against their cobalt robes and scarlet sashes.
Working women equal moral corruption!
A few more feet until she would rally this all-white, 150-person flock floundering in one of the Lone Star State’s poorest, most crime-ridden ZIP codes into a flourishing, multicultural discipleship of 500.
Working mothers equal child abuse!
A few more feet until she would become the first female pastor of a Southern Baptist church in the state of Texas.
A few more feet.
Head swiveling about, Taylor, seven, squeezed her hand.
“Mom! Who is Jezebel, and why are they calling you that?”
“We’ll talk later—let’s keep walking.”
And so they did.
By the benediction, the news cameras were gone, and so were the shouting men.
Ten years and some 875 miles to the east later, dull silver clouds stretch idly in the heavens as dawn breaks above this holy ground. Below, on the lip of a broad lawn, two stone marquees anchor the cross-capped steeple of First Baptist Church of Decatur into the corner of Clairemont Avenue and Commerce Drive. The marquees are the world’s window into the church, and today twenty-two white letters proclaim the name of its recently appointed pastor.
A new house of worship. A new life. A new mission for Julie Pennington-Russell.
Organized alphabetically, the marquee’s extra letters lean in cubbyholes in the church copy room. Julie is there, as she is every Sunday morning at eight, standing before the altar of her “holy copier” in Birkenstocks and jeans. She’s forty-seven now, but her years reveal themselves lightly. Gold-rimmed glasses frame her burnt-umber eyes, and strands of gray have only begun to sprout from the bangs of her still-short sandy blond hair. After she laughs—and she does, often—the apostrophes around her mouth are inclined to remain.
At the copier, she reduces the manuscript of the day’s sermon in size, then turns to the paper cutter and positions her stack. A grinding metallic screech cleaves her humming as she raises the cutter’s handle into position.
“I’ve always sort of envied preachers . . . ”
Lift, cut, turn.
“ . . . who could have three words on a piece of paper, you know.”
Lift, cut, turn.
“But whenever I do that, I have flashbacks to my seventh grade piano recital . . . ”
Lift, cut, turn.
“ . . . when I forgot the piece in the middle.”
Lift, cut, turn.
“You know, you’re playing it by memory . . . ”
Lift, cut, turn.
“ . . . and it all goes blank.”
Eighteen times she lifts and cuts and turns her sermon. Then sheet by sheet she carefully tapes the stack into the onionskin-thin pages of her “preaching Bible.” It’s a version she no longer uses—New American Standard—but large and floppy it feels good in her hands; she likes to hold a Bible when she preaches. Through decades of use its burgundy leather has weathered in spots, but on the cover, stamped in gold, “Julie Kay Pennington” is still visible. It was a gift from her mother.
Barbara and Ron Pennington shared many things. They were born and bred in Birmingham, Alabama; they attended the same elementary school; and both lost fathers—hers, a mine inspector, his, a coal miner—in the same mine explosion. They shared a loving, happy home and two children, Julie and baby Ron, whom Julie just called “Brother.”
But they would not share this. Shortly after Julie was born on July 4, 1960, Ron was reassigned from Lockbourne Air Force Base in Columbus, Ohio, to Bermuda. It was there among the white sands and palm shade that Barbara was baptized in a Baptist church. She was now a believer. Ron, on the other hand, though he had professed his faith as a teenager, had since become disillusioned with the church. People weren’t real there—they were always ducking behind stained glass and talking like they had steeples down their throats. He didn’t feel welcome. No, thanks.
From then on, it was Barbara who would share her faith with Julie and Brother. It was Barbara who would haul them from Baptist church to Baptist church to Baptist church all over the country, wherever her husband was stationed. American Baptist churches, Independent Baptist churches, Southern Baptist churches. Big churches, little churches, and even a church that met in a school bus in the middle of a California field. Most traditional, some conservative, all loving.
Eventually, Barbara’s faith became Julie’s, but as a Christian and eventually as a pastor, Julie took something just as valuable away from her father’s sidelong glances at the church. She has little tolerance for “fakey, insincere God talk” and likes a little irreverence.
“You don’t have to have been in Sunday School for twenty years to get that God is real and amazing and wonderful—that’s how I like to preach.”
By eight-thirty, the preacher is standing in her office, talking to herself. Bespectacled head bowing into her sermon, cross swinging from her neck, Pastor Julie leans over the day’s message, mutters it aloud, makes changes in red pen, and sings along with praise music. It’s an important day. Deacon ordination. A sea foam compact pops open, a golden tube of lipstick twists up.
Still in her Birkenstocks and jeans, she walks down the hall and around the corner to Carreker Fellowship Hall for the first service of the day, “Fresh Start.” Hot coffee, its strong smell sliding across this basement room beneath the sanctuary, is offered to those who need more than Jesus for a jolt this morning. But Julie, after introducing a few new faces to a few old ones and getting miked up, heads straight for the stage and gathers the deacons-to-be—eight men, six women—tightly around for last-minute instructions.
Across the room, Taylor, a sturdy seventeen-year-old with soft brown curls, and Lucy, thirteen, a blonde whose locks are perpetually pony-tailed, sit in two tall coffeehouse-style chairs and poke at one another. On stage, Tim, silver snow frosting his once-red curls, tunes up with the Fresh Start band, a caramel-colored bass across his waist. Soon the rows of cushioned seats and leather recliners fill with families and couples and teens in denim.
“Well friends, welcome to this hour and to this time of worship together.”
She introduces herself, in case there are some first-timers, encouraging them to call her something other than her mouthful of a name: Julie, Pastor Julie, Julie P-R, JPR. Holding the burgundy Bible in her left hand and gesturing with the right, she begins to teach from Acts 6:1-7. Once a communicative disorders undergrad at the University of Central Florida, she orates with the careful cadence of an elementary school teacher. After the resurrection of Jesus, the early church was growing. New members were joining. Problems were arising.
“You know, we’re only six chapters into the story of the whole church of Jesus Christ—just six chapters!—before complaining breaks out. Someone has said this is ironclad proof that you can trace Baptists all the way back to the New Testament!”
The crowd laughs. There is truth in humor, and Julie employs it often.
In Jerusalem, the church leaders decide to appoint deacons—“servants of the Servant”—to attend to the neglected needs of the congregation. Now it is time to ordain her own.
“Do you know what our deacons’ chief function in this church is around here? It’s to help 100 percent of our congregation—every man, every woman, every young person—to be engaged in ministry of some kind that makes their heart sing and for which they’ve been gifted by God.
“And so at First Baptist Church, we remind ourselves often that in the church of Jesus, every believer gets changed by God. That’s how we all come in—transformed. And then we’re gifted and called and equipped to use our gifts, and then turned loose to serve with those gifts in the church or in the world. And in the image of Jesus, everybody has a piece of the mission.”
One by one the deacons, black and white, share their prayers for First Decatur in the coming year. Last, a friendly brunette in a black skirt and high heels takes the mic.
“Hi, my name is Carla Stanford, and my prayer for our church is that all of us here as believers will open our ears and we will listen for God when he says, ‘Follow me.’ And we’ll say, ‘Here I am, Lord, send me.’ And we will go out and we will do the mission of Jesus Christ.”
In the beginning she did not believe god condoned anyone in lipstick or a skirt or high heels or whose name was Julie or Carla becoming a deacon, much less a minister. Women were equal to men in God’s eyes, yes, but hadn’t the genders been given different spiritual gifts? Surely being a church leader was not a woman’s call.
It was her first semester at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in San Francisco, 1982. She was there for the worst reason possible, and she knew it. At the very conservative Southern Baptist church she had attended in Orlando during college, it was in the water, in the culture: If you were graduating school and you loved Jesus just this much, then you went to seminary—it was just the spiritual thing to do. Well, she loved Jesus even a little bit more than this much, so with $11 in her pocket, off she flew.
At the Orlando church it had also been proclaimed from the pulpit: Women have this place but not that. She knew of Paul’s letters to the early church. 1 Timothy 2:11-12: A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. And 1 Corinthians 14:33-35: As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire of something, they should ask their husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church. But now that she was at seminary, she was confused. There were women here at Golden Gate—God-connected, smart, gifted, warm, wonderful women—who claimed to be called to the ministry. Not music ministry or children’s ministry or any of the other roles toward which women typically turned, but get-in-front-of-the-church-and-lead-people ministry. And this Southern Baptist seminary was affirming those calls. How could this be? She needed to talk to God.
So every morning she set her alarm forty-five minutes early. Beep! Beep! Five-thirty. After padding down her dormitory hall to a prayer room, she got down on her knees and began to pray for these “poor, misguided women.” Why do they believe this, Lord? Are they going against your Word? Or is there more to the story?
With time, a door began to crack open, and light, little by little, began to creep into a very dark room. She spoke with professors. Paul’s letters were written to specific churches dealing with specific problems—including hindrances to worship, such as talkative women. She spoke with administrators. His words were descriptive of a first-century culture, not necessarily prescriptive of all to come. She spoke with peers. And what of Phoebe, whom Paul praises as a deacon? And Paul’s friend Priscilla, who along with her husband, Aquila, taught the preacher Apollos—a man—more accurately the ways of the Lord? She looked in the Bible to the deity whose example all Christians were supposed to follow. And after the resurrection, didn’t Jesus choose to reveal his risen self to a woman, Mary Magdalene, before his own disciples? Didn’t he deem her worthy to go and tell the good news? Wasn’t she the apostle to the apostles?
Nudge by nudge, her worldview changed. She changed. She began to feel the full weight of the apostle Peter’s words at the Pentecost, when Jesus ascended to heaven and the Holy Spirit entered all those who believed:
In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions; your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.
And Paul’s own words regarding belief:
You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
No male.
No female.
One.
“I’ve got my pearls all ready for eleven o’clock.”
After Fresh Start, Julie rushes back to her office. To adjust her mind-set from the casual culture of the early service to that of the eleven o’clock—the more populated, conventional of the two—is the hardest part of her day. She emerges from her private bathroom wearing a black blazer over a black sleeveless blouse, a long, multicolored skirt, black loafers, and her string of pearls.
She sits. She hums. She reads back over her sermon. A sermon she spent the whole week preparing. A sermon she had to forego a Saturday with her husband and children to finish. A sermon she awoke at 4 a.m. to perfect. But in her eyes, she is not perfect. It is not perfect. There is always room for improvement.
Upstairs, the sanctuary begins to fill.
Preaching is a practice; if done well, an art. The first day of her first preaching class left her doubting her call to do either. She was one of two women out of forty students. As soon as he entered the room, the professor spotted them.
“Ah! I see we have two ladies in the class! Well, that’s marvelous! And you know what I always say: that a woman preaching is rather like a dog walking on its hind legs—neither of them does it well, but you’re surprised it can be done at all!”
These were actually the words of another man—eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson. Sweeping the professor’s bias aside, Julie otherwise received only encouragement for her craft. Eventually she was even given the chance to put what she was learning into practice.
One Sunday her second year of seminary, she and a few friends happened into a funky little white wooden house of worship in San Francisco. It was two-story and ramshackle, with marine blue trim and a neon sign that said Nineteenth Avenue Baptist Church. Six multicultural congregations shared the building, and from seven in the morning until ten at night, any number of languages—Japanese, Cambodian, Estonian, whatever—could be heard singing and praying. That morning, the English-speaking congregation was in desperate need of a music minister. Julie played piano; she had a good voice. In a church of eighty, this was qualification enough. Would she help? She agreed.
One day after hearing her give a devotional in a staff meeting, the pastor, Bill Smith, gave her some advice.
“Julie, you should really think about preaching.”
Her first chance behind the pulpit came when Pastor Smith decided to go on vacation. She was nervous, but almost eighty hours of writing and praying and rehearsing later, she put on her “girl suit” and drove to church. The early service was sparsely attended that Sunday morning—twelve people. But as she began to speak, something happened. She felt invaded by light. In nine minutes, the sermon was over; in her excitement she had spoken too quickly. But Pastor Smith would give her more chances to preach and to pastor. She visited the ill and conducted funerals and led groups. She made mistakes and she learned from them. Not everyone was thrilled. Mildred Butner, a formidable bulwark of a woman, pulled Pastor Smith aside.
“If I’m ever sick, don’t send the kid to my bedside.”
When Julie graduated seminary, Nineteenth Avenue called on her again, to stay in San Francisco as associate pastor. She agreed. A few years later, when Smith left for a church in Washington, D.C., they called on her once more. Will you be our pastor?
This time, she said no. She felt a call, yes—but that call was still overwhelming. She needed more time. So for the next three years she continued as associate pastor to love the congregation. To listen to God. And when that pastor left they asked her again to take the position. This time, she said yes.
The summer before she began her pastorate she married Tim, the laid-back product of a childhood in Hawaii and California. The son of a preacher, Tim encouraged her calling. They had met while they were both in seminary, and though Tim had served as a campus minister before they were married, he never aspired to be a pastor himself. Instead, he worked in web design and served in the church, as he has at all of Julie’s pastorates, by being a deacon, playing in the band, doing whatever needed doing. When the kids came—and they did, quickly—Tim helped take care of them. “Parenting our children together, there’s no way I could do what I do if he weren’t carrying even more than half the load.”
With his support, Julie led the small but energetic membership of Nineteenth Avenue for six years. Every week, seminary students and professors, University of California medical students, internationally recognized opera singers, and even the president of Golden Gate crowded the little church to hear her preach. Her gender, in general, was a non-issue. This was San Francisco, after all, where being a Baptist anything was a very conservative choice—and a female pastor was not the strangest or craziest or most radical thing one could hope to be.
There were members of the California State Baptist Convention, though, who did not agree. Five years in a row, other Baptists tried to unseat Nineteenth Avenue’s messengers at the meeting—and twice succeeded—because the church’s pastor was a woman. They did not know her, of course. They did not need to know her, or that her congregants loved her, or the number of people she had led to the Lord. All they needed to know they could tell by her name: Julie Pennington-Russell.
On her last day at Nineteenth Avenue, fourteen years since first stepping through the door, she and Mildred Butner wept in one another’s arms. It was time to move on. Calvary and Waco and the picketers called.
Upstairs, a more aged laity than that of Fresh Start sits and talks and reads the worship program. Thin, rectangular pillows the color of banana flesh cushion the pews the congregants perch upon, hard wooden benches painted cream. The cushions, more often suggesting comfort than supplying it, are worn now, their crevices filled with the lint from a thousand Sunday bests. Upon the backs of the pews rest Baptist Hymnals, two by two, but they are rarely used anymore. Instead, three giant screens—two above the altar, one in the back, for the choir—now project the words of the songs they will sing and the scriptures they will recite in a font size fit for Goliath. Above, six brushed metal chandeliers suspend from the ceiling, lofty as the firmament. Late morning rays filter through the pastel panes of fourteen stained glass windows, softly arched, aiding the light. Cutting through the windows is a balcony that fills up with youths in hoodies and button-downs and basketball shorts as the prelude ends. Tim takes his seat there now, by himself, as Lucy joins her friends and Taylor his.
Down front behind the forest green altar, a choir in vanilla robes and violet sashes enters, along with a few faithful musicians: a trombone, a sax, two trumpets, two French horns. Dozens of silver cylindrical organ pipes, short and thin and tall and squat, rise up from windows in the baptistery above them.
Julie says “Amen” to a prayer with her deacons in a small classroom outside the sanctuary and then joins the congregation. Not sitting in a chair overlooking them from the altar but among them, on a front pew. A shepherd to her flock.
Yes I am the pastor.
Yes I am a leader.
Yes the office of minister is an honor and it’s sacred and it’s mysterious and I love it. But I am not doing anything that any of you could not do, were you so called and so gifted.
I am but one of you.
As the service begins and the choir sings, she sits there, ankles crossed, hands folded, leaning forward into the moment with a look of rapturous joy. The crowd behind her and above her is thick today, most likely pushing 500. The rolls of the church hold more names, though, closer to 2,700. First Baptist Decatur is now the largest Southern Baptist church with a woman at its helm.
About fifteen rows back from Pastor Julie sits John Britt, a tall, stately man silvered in his age who has been a member here some twenty-four of the church’s 146 years. Anyone who came in the front doors this morning has probably already met him. Most Sundays he stands out there on the porch beside yellowed columns and greets incoming worshippers.
He is thoughtful.
He is polite.
He is one of seven reasons she is here.
A year and a half earlier, First Baptist Decatur was without a pastor. After being voted onto the search team, John Britt and six other men and women set out to find out whom this church wanted, whom this church needed. So they canvassed the congregation, asking them to submit everything they were looking for in a minister. When they finished, they had a list four typed pages long. Britt showed it to Dock Hollingsworth, a professor at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, who was serving as their interim pastor.
“I’m not sure the Lord himself could qualify for what y’all are looking for here.”
But when it came down to it, what they were looking for was someone with vision. Back in the seventies, First Decatur became so populated it spawned six other churches. Their vine bore much fruit. But somewhere along the way the members grew too comfortable, too settled. The numbers dwindled and so did enthusiasm. The vine lost its vigor.
So they sent out a call. And this time, for the first time, they opened up the possibilities with three words in the job posting: he or she. Sixty-four resumes and videos later, they began to sift the wheat from the chaff. Sixty-four became sixteen, then six, then three. But like a cork, one from Waco kept bobbing to the top.
At Calvary, Julie had asked her white upper-middle-class congregation of commuters to put their money where their souls were and move into the church’s God-forsaken community. What better way could we minister to the marginalized outside our walls? Twenty-three families did. The church was enlightened.
She had also declared general amnesty. If you’ve been working in the nursery the past fifteen years and you hate it, quit! Pray so that you might find what contribution to the church might bring you joy. And they did. The church was invigorated.
Intrigued, the seven from Decatur gave her a call.
Julie answered the phone in surprise. A woman who knew her had asked permission to send in her resume for the Decatur job. Sure, why not? But she wasn’t interested in leaving Calvary; in fact, the last thing she wanted to do was go to a First Baptist Church anywhere. Surely any church that had been around long enough to earn the name “First” would have 150 years of tradition and bureaucracy and sacred cows and we’ve always done it this way and for heaven’s sake, don’t touch that carpet! It would be a jail sentence. But then the search committee asked her for a statement of vision. How does she view the church? With nothing to lose, she went for it.
. . . I believe that the church exists for people we haven’t met yet. The church does not exist to maintain the institution and to keep the committees running and the budget afloat and the light bills paid, and if that’s why we exist we really ought to fold up and let somebody use the building that could do some good. . .
It was a vision that shook them. This was someone who could turn First Decatur’s eyes toward its community once more. So they went to Calvary to see her work firsthand, spreading out among the crowd so as to not raise pastor-poaching suspicions. What they saw there convinced them. She was warm, funny, and gracious. Her preaching was from the Gospel; she was a woman of the Word. Britt left impressed. “Everything about her ministry and everything that we saw out there wasn’t about her, it was about God—and it was so refreshing to see this.” They called anyone they could think of who had crossed paths with Julie over the years, and the results were the same. Everyone they spoke with praised her, including Joy Yee, the current pastor of Nineteenth Avenue.
“She has been gone from here nine years, but this congregation still pines for her.”
It was time for a vote; it was down to three. The search committee talked. They prayed. And then one of the seven finally spoke up.
“I really feel led—why don’t we decide to make this a unanimous decision?”
And so they did.
They then presented their nominee to the deacons. After a few looks of surprise, the deacons talked. They prayed. And then one of them finally spoke up.
“You guys, we’ve prayed for you for a year to do the right thing, and you tell us that the Holy Spirit led you here, and who are we to argue with that? I recommend that we unanimously adopt it.”
And so they did.
After they presented their choice to the church, they brought Julie to speak before the final vote. And though she had initially been wary of this “First” Baptist, she had seen something in the faces of the search committee that she could see in the faces before her now. Something that said maybe what has been isn’t what God means for it to be forever. Something that said maybe we’re ready to recapture a passion for God. Yes, she thought, these are people I can love.
At the end of her sermon the congregation voted.
Five hundred people.
Five nays.
A standing ovation.
She was so called.
God is mysterious. his “word,” the Bible, is mysterious. And when Christians can’t agree with what the words inside that Word mean, it can spark hard feelings and rifts and bitterness and judgments and a hundred other perversions of what the record of God’s revelation of himself to mankind is supposed to represent: love.
For Baptists, these differences of opinion often spring from the historic denominational principle of “priesthood of the believer”—in short, that each individual is free before God to interpret scripture. But when it comes to whether or not women are equally called to posts of leadership such as pastor or deacon, the scripture can seem inconsistent: the apostle Paul writes that a deacon should be the husband of one wife, yet he mentions Phoebe as a deacon, and so on. Confusing, yes. Contradictory? Within the context of first-century culture and the specific problems being addressed by the scriptures, not necessarily.
Verily, both sides of the debate believe the Bible to be a divinely inspired verity. However, what the side that most often brands itself “complementarian” (women’s spiritual gifts are complementary, not equal, to men’s) most often accuses the other side, the “egalitarians,” of doing—picking and choosing scripture to fit their needs—they are guilty of themselves. After all, few Baptists follow other seemingly first-century-related New Testament decrees such as the ban on women wearing gold or pearls or expensive clothes in church (1 Tim 2:9).
But some Baptists have taken the issue further. In 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which represents the country’s largest Protestant denomination, changed its statement of beliefs, The Baptist Faith and Message, to specifically limit the office of pastor to men. While not a creed per se—Baptist churches are autonomous—its inclusion, to some, was discouraging.
Upon hearing of First Decatur’s decision to hire Julie, the Reverend Al Mohler, one of the architects of the 2000 changes and the current president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, questioned the choice in a blog titled “Triumph or Tragedy? A Church Set to Make History.”
“A look at Julie Pennington-Russell’s education, experience, and related qualifications would appear to qualify her for a major pulpit . . . except for the fact she is a woman,” he wrote.
Mohler also took exception to the search committee’s claim that they “were not making a statement” but following the call of the Holy Spirit. First Decatur, however, did not so much make a statement as build upon precedent. It was one of the first Southern Baptist churches in Georgia to ordain women. And in 1984, when the SBC passed a resolution opposing the ordination of women, its pastor at the time, Dr. Peter Rhea Jones, now pastor emeritus and a professor at McAfee, preached one of the first sermons condemning it. “I want to tell you,” he said, “my mother, my wife, and my daughter are not second-class citizens.” Though historically affiliated with the SBC, First Decatur is also dually aligned with—and gives the largest portion of its tithes and offerings to—the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), an Atlanta-based group of moderate Baptists who defected from the SBC over a number of issues, not the least of which was the support of women in the ministry.
As in many matters, though, when it comes to Baptists practicing what they preach, reality does not always reflect attitudes. In a 2007 survey of Baptists, SBC and CBF included, 93 percent of those surveyed supported the ordination of women to the pastorate. Yet today, Julie Pennington-Russell is one of only seventy-eight or so women serving as the sole pastors in Baptist churches of any kind.
On a rare rainy night in January, Baptists by the thousands stream into the Georgia World Congress Center’s cavernous exhibit hall B. One is white, middle-aged and mustachioed, here from Virginia Beach with his wife. A green sequined pillbox hat crowns another, black and fragile, who is helped along by a young man in a sharp suit. It is the second night of the three-day New Baptist Covenant Celebration, a historic gathering of thirty-one Baptist organizations from across North America.
Back and forth, back and forth, Julie paces barefoot whispering to herself. In a few minutes the night’s plenary session will begin. In a few minutes she will go out of this conference room, down the escalators, into the hall, behind a thick royal blue curtain, and up onto the stage to address this crowd of 10,000.
Speakers at these morning and nightly sessions include prolific author and pastor Tony Campolo, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, who helped organize this event, and tonight, following Julie, the novelist John Grisham. She is the only female pastor—and only one of two women—who have been asked to give a message.
As she approaches the lectern, the multitude sits waiting. Among them are First Decatur members wearing T-shirts with “JPR” on the front and “She’s our pastor!” on the back. Tim sits at the end of an aisle next to pastor Joy Yee and music minister Mary Beth Johnson, in town from Nineteenth Avenue. Cameras flash and Julie begins her sermon. She is slated to speak about respecting diversity. But she has other plans.
“Tonight in particular, the banner we’re waving and the gift we’re celebrating is our Baptist tradition of respecting each other’s differences . . . And friends, that is no small accomplishment . . . There’s cultural diversity, political and geographical diversity, east-of-the-river Baptists, west-of-the-river Baptists . . . Northern, Southern, left-leaning, right-leaning, contemporary, traditional, high-falutin’ liturgy, low-falutin’ liturgy, Baptists who shout in the choir loft, Baptists who sleep in the choir loft, Baptists who got rid of the choir loft!”
The thousands laugh, and she continues.
“ . . . Is this really the gift we came so far to give each other this week? Respecting the diversity? Was this why you paid for a plane ticket? One hundred and fifty bucks a night at the Marriott? It’s a fine word, make no mistake. When you and I are respectful to each other, God is in that. It’s a positive thing . . . But truthfully, when you and I open the box and break the tape and peel back the tissue, is respectfulness the gift we most wanted to find? . . . Because respect, in the end, has no power to change something that’s fundamentally broken in you and me. Between you and me, only love can do that.
“ . . . It’s love, y’all! Why is it so hard for us? You know, you’d think the church would be the first place folks out there would come looking for it. But what they often find instead are pews full of people who seemed to have figured out everything about Christianity except that it’s about love!
“Let’s not pretend we’re any good at this; we’re not. I know my own little vinegar heart can’t begin to pull it off . . . But above all, let’s never doubt that the love of Jesus Christ in us and through us has the power to change the world.”
A cacophony of clapping and shouting.
Yes, Lord!
Amen!
When she finishes, Julie steps over and takes her place on the stage among seven men.
She is so called.
© Reprinted by permission from the May Issue of Atlanta Magazine, 260 Peachtree St. Suite 300, Atlanta, GA 30303, 404-527-5500.
