Growing Up Southern Baptist

I wanted to be a minister, but I was a girl

A friend told me once that when we were in High School, I used to talk about God so much that it was annoying.

When I was a child and a teen, the church was the center of my life. I went to church Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night. I spent hours studying the bible, and singing hymns.

At 14, I had a deeply spiritual conversion experience. I had been baptized before that, but I was baptized again after having the realization of what it actually meant to be saved.

While attending church camp, myself and a few others went forward saying that we had felt called to the ministry. We went back to our own church with a renewed fervor for God.

Then, one day, I was quietly pulled aside by an older girl and told that I could never be a pastor because I was a girl. Maybe I could be a music pastor or a Sunday school teacher.

All I wanted was to share the overwhelming feeling of God’s love with other people.

Then I was told that I couldn’t.

I wondered, why would God call my heart to serve if he didn’t want me? Why was my love for him not worth as much as a man?

I prayed, read and studied as much as possible, I realized that I could have switched to another denomination that did allow women to be pastors. I was still resolute.

Then, a bunch of other things happened that gradually made me see the hypocrisy of the church, and little by little I slid away.

I saw the church shut the door on people that were in need, people that were suffering and seeking God. I saw them told that they were no longer welcome in the church, and it broke my heart.

Still, I kept seeking.

I minored in Religious Studies in college. I learned about the history of Christianity, as well as other world religions. I studied the bible backwards and forwards. I wanted to believe that the words of Christ were real. But I was disillusioned.

The more I learned about both the history of Christianity, and saw the things that the church was doing to hurt people in the political sphere, I finally left the church.

It wasn’t a big moment. It happened little by little. I went to church less and less, until I finally didn’t go at all. I felt like the people in the church didn’t have the answers that I needed anymore. I felt rejected.

Women’s Voices are Silenced in the Church

At one point, I hoped that I could change the church from the inside, but then I realized that women’s voices aren’t heard. Women make up the bulk of church-going people in America. But all of the church leaders are still men.

According to Pew Research, “More than seven-in-ten U.S. Christian women (72%) say religion is “very important” in their lives, compared with 62% of the country’s Christian men, according to Pew Research Center’s 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study. Roughly eight-in-ten Christian women also say they are absolutely certain God exists and that the Bible is the word of God, compared with about seven-in-ten men who say this.”

Although women are more religious than men, there are still fewer women in leadership positions in the church. They face the same discrimination that I did as a young girl.

Pew research states that, “We looked at nine major religious organizations in the U.S. that both ordain women and allow them to hold top leadership slots. Of those organizations, four have had a woman in the top leadership position. And, so far, each of these four has had only one woman in the top position.”

Equality has a long way to go in the church.

This is sad, considering that in the early days of Christianity, it was a more egalitarian religion. Women were allowed to be participating members of the church in the first centuries, while Christianity was still considered to be an apocalyptic religion.

In the days when Christians still believed that the return of Christ was imminent, women were treated as equals.

According to Bible Odyssey,

we know from the Pauline letters that women were apostles, women were diakonae* — and that does not mean diakonos like in our day, Paul calls himself diakonos — that women were leaders of house churches, women were missionaries and founded churches; so we know that all these offices, all the gifts of the spirit men had, women had. We also know from the Gospel literature that women were followers of Jesus. The leading figure here is Mary of Magdala who even in the so-called patristic periods still was called “apostle to the apostles.” So the women [who] went with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem where the first witnesses of the execution of Jesus and the first witnesses to the resurrection.

When did this all change? Was it with the fusion of the Church with the Roman state? At some point, women were relegated back to the same subservient positions within the church that women held in the wider society of the time.

In later centuries, up to the present day, women are treated as “less than” in the eyes of the church. It is a social view, not a religious view. Even Jesus himself did not hold to this view and had women who were among those following him from place to place as he taught.

Since women’s voices have been silenced in the church, I no longer find a place for myself there, by virtue of the body that I was born with. It isn’t something that I can change, either about myself or about the church, so I fell away.

I had to find something else to believe in, since I refuse to be a part of a church that treats me as less because I am a woman.

I am a mother of little girls. I couldn’t bring them up in a church that believes they are less just because they were born as girls. Shouldn’t God care more about our hearts than our parts?

What has your experience been with the church? Do you feel that women are treated equally? Have you seen women allowed to speak their minds in the church? Let me know in the comments.

❤ Nicole

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