Pentecost 7
28 June 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
W. Gregory Pope
HOW MY MIND CHANGED ABOUT WOMEN PASTORS
Genesis 1.26-27. Acts 2.14-18.
1 Corinthians 11.2-15. 14.34-36. Galatians 3.23-29
The notion of women pastors came back into the news this month, and Facebook reminded us of the diversity of strong opinions on the matter. As a Baptist church here at Vineville with the Baptist freedom to make our own decisions as led by God’s Spirit we ordain women as deacons and ministers. And though you have called two very gifted ordained women to serve on our ministerial staff, you haven’t yet called a woman as pastor. For very selfish reasons, I hope you don’t consider it for at least another decade!
Given the diversity of our congregation in religious experience and biblical interpretation, I know we are not all in full agreement on all issues related to women in ministry. And that’s alright. We can still worship and pray together, serve God together, and learn from each other.
While I cannot speak for each of you on the matter of women pastors, I thought I would share with you today my own story of personal experience and biblical understanding and how my own mind changed over the years.
I did not grow up in a church where women were ordained as deacons or pastors. My parents were not in favor of women in ordained ministry until their granddaughter – my daughter Kristen – said she felt called to ordained ministry. From that moment on you better not have said in their presence that God doesn’t call women to ordained ministry!
But when I took off for college I was full of my bold opinions about a woman’s place in the church (and it was not behind a pulpit). I would emphasize those scriptures focused on the silence and submission of women and paid little attention to those scriptures that revealed the leadership and equality of women in the early church. My way of biblical interpretation
was to latch on to a hard and fast Bible verse like “women are to be silent in the church” or “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man,” while paying no attention to the context in which those words were written or noticing other biblical instances in different contexts that might have added some complexity to my hard and fast Bible verse.
I also managed to ignore the respect and dignity with which Jesus treated women, which sat in strong opposition to the treatment of women in his culture.
I also ignored how at Pentecost Peter quotes the prophet Joel saying that when God’s Holy Spirit is poured out “your sons and daughters shall preach.”
I’m not sure why I ignored those verses. As one who already felt called to ordain ministry, perhaps I was afraid that women in ministry would make male mediocrity less marketable!
I think most of us would agree that the most significant news this world has ever heard is that
Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead. It had never occurred to me the first person given responsibility to share that news by Jesus himself was a woman named Mary. Jesus could have very easily thought to himself: “You know, this is really important news. The men around here tend not to believe what women say. Perhaps I should let John or Peter share this news. This first-century culture is not ready yet to hear God’s message from a woman.” But no, that’s not what he did. It was a woman, one of the faithful women who stood at the foot of his cross on the worst day of his life and who arrived on Sunday morning with plans to anoint his dead body. It was a woman who first preached the good news of resurrection.
Though I could not admit it at the time, like everyone else I did my share of picking and choosing the verses I considered crystal clear and universally applicable and the verses I pushed aside or excused myself from. Verses like: “Give to anyone who asks” or “Go sell all that you have and give it to the poor.”
I ignored the New Testament prohibition against women wearing jewelry and spent my allowance on a necklace for my 5th grade girlfriend Linda Wilbanks. I did not know that her Seventh Day Adventist Church did not ignore that Bible verse, which led her to kindly return my sacrificial gift.
And while I held tightly to the verse on silencing women, it did not occur to me that three chapters earlier in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians Paul gave instructions to women on how to pray in church. It would seem that by definition “silence” would prohibit a woman from praying, singing, or speaking in church. But that doesn’t seem to be the case in most churches.
I also never paid attention – are you picking up a theme here? – “I never paid attention” to how the early church made decisions. In Acts chapter 15, the early church was trying to decide whether to allow Gentiles into the church and whether Gentile men had to be circumcised to be allowed into the church. The Bible was clear that Gentiles were unclean and should not be considered part of God’s people and that all men included among God’s covenant people must be circumcised. However, disagreement broke out on the issue in the early church. It became clear that there were Gentiles exhibiting gifts of the Holy Spirit and believing in Jesus as Savior and Lord.
What was the church to do? Well, they formed a committee to decide the matter. They met and prayed together and eventually decided to allow Gentiles into the church and not require male circumcision. What gave them the authority to change the rules? The Bible was clear. When asked to explain their reasoning they said, “It seemed good to us and to the Holy Spirit.” Their own experience of witnessing the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Gentiles and time spent in prayer led them to see that God was doing something new among them.
And aren’t you glad? If not, likely everyone of us Gentiles would not be allowed to join God’s covenant people in the church.
But as a teenager, I didn’t see this way of discerning God’s will by listening to the Holy Spirit with others. So off to college I went armed with my well-meaning Bible-believing convictions unashamed to share with anyone my understanding regarding the role of women in the church. Perhaps that had something to do with my almost non-existent date life in college. You think?
Then during my junior year something happened. A young woman named Cathy Furr sat me down and said to me with a kind and gentle spirit: “Greg, I wish you could experience what it feels like to know in your heart that God has called you to a certain ministry, and to hear everyone around you say ‘No, God has not called you to that ministry because you are a woman.’”
And miracle of miracles this twenty year old arrogant college boy listened. Had I not listened I wonder if my ordained Reverend daughter would have been able to hear God’s call upon her life. Would my objections have covered her ears to the call of God upon her life?
Those honest gentle words from a young college woman marked the beginning of what I have come to believe to be a work of the Holy Spirit in my life. I began to ask myself questions I had never asked myself before: Does God call people to certain ministries based solely upon physical anatomy? With the help of religion professor Joe Baskin at Shorter College who possessed a deep love for scripture. I also began to see things in the Bible I had not seen before because I had already decided what I believed before I read more deeply into the text.
It wasn’t long before Paul’s letter to the Galatians became an eye-opening epistle of freedom for me where the apostle Paul write those revolutionary words that “in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. We are all one in Christ.” Racial, ethnic, and differences in nationality do not matter. Social class and economic status no longer matter. Gender no longer matters. We are all one, we are all equal, in Christ.
And then I would read honest biblical scholars who did not hide unsettling truths. You may or may not have noticed before that the words I read earlier about “Women being silent in church and waiting to get home to ask their husbands questions about anything they didn’t understand” – in most translations are in brackets. That’s because in the best and oldest biblical manuscripts we possess those verses are not found. They appear to have been added later, which was a little unsettling for me to hear. And while that doesn’t settle all issues of biblical interpretation regarding women in ministry, it does give us pause and call us to keep our hearts open to the Spirit, regardless of the way we feel about the issue.
When we read scripture it is important to consider both the context of scripture and the influence of our own personal experience. If we’ve been taught all our lives that something is wrong, it’s difficult to see it a different way, even when we want to. When we experience something for the first time, no matter what it is, it can seem a bit strange to us. The first time you hear a woman preach or see a woman in the role of pastor, it might appear odd because we’re not used to it or we’ve been told it’s not right.
There’s a story I was told over 30 years ago that reveals how what we see influences what we believe. Back in the early 1980s, a small Baptist church in rural Kentucky called a woman named Molly Marshall to serve as their pastor. She was there for several years while working on her Ph.D. One Sunday afternoon, some children decided they were going to play church. They had done this before and the girl had always been the preacher. On this particular occasion, the boy said he wanted to be the preacher. But the girl said, “Oh no, only girls can be preachers.” And what did the little boy say in reply? “Okay.” Molly was the only preacher they had known. It was all they had ever seen. So they logically assumed that only girls could be preachers.
The same thing has happened to some of us, has it not? You ask someone what they think about women pastors, and some people will honestly say it just seems odd to have a woman behind the pulpit preaching or leading a church as pastor. And of course, anything new will seem odd. But that doesn’t make it wrong.
When I am away on vacation, as I was a couple of weeks ago, I will often have a woman fill the pulpit, not to make a progressive statement, but so that little girls and other women who may be sensing God leading them to preach will see that God could very well do just that. Sometimes we have to witness and experience something before we believe it is a possibility for us.
Many people do not accept the ordination of women because of authority issues. Did I oppose women pastors because as a male I wanted to have ruling authority? People often quote
those words of Paul about a woman not having authority over a man. But when Jesus spoke to the disciples about the nature of ministry, he said that ministry is not about having ruling authority over others. He said, “Don’t be like the gentiles who take their authority and lord it over people. Be among people as one who serves.” In that most beautiful scene in the Upper Room of Jesus
washing his disciples feet – that is what ministry is about.
Pastoral ordination is not about being a ruling authority. It is about service. It’s about modeling and teaching the way of Jesus. It’s about getting involved in other people’s dirt and washing their feet and pronouncing God’s cleansing grace upon them. It’s about loving people. It’s about helping people listen for the Holy Spirit in their lives. It’s about exercising prayerful leadership. Who among us has not known women who are gifted to do those things?
And then we look at the way Jesus treated women, the way he encouraged Martha’s sister Mary to sit at his feet in the manner a disciple sat at the feet of a rabbi and learn from him. That was not done in that culture. Jesus treated women with equality and respect. Better than picking and choosing Bible verses to shape our opinions we are called to follow Jesus’ example to shape our way of life.
My mind was also changed about women in ministry by simply listening to women preachers and watching women pastors faithfully lead and care for congregations: Episcopalians like Barbara Brown Taylor. Nazarenes like Tara Beth Leach. Baptists like my friends Julie Long at First Baptist Macon, Caitlin Brown at Highland Hills, Emily Hull McGee in Winston Salem, Andrea Dellinger Jones in Rome. And other women ministers with profound pastoral leadership skills like my colleagues Angela Blizzard and Leigh Halverson and (if you will permit me) my own daughter Kristen Mathis.
When I see gifted women preach and lead I am often reminded of the man who was asked if he believed in women preachers. And he said, “Believe in ‘em? Why, I’ve seen ‘em!” Churches who ordain women and call women as pastors, do so not only because certain women believe that God has called them to ministry but because we have witnessed their gifts of ministry.
I am quite passionate about the calling of women to serve as pastors and will always support them in their calling. But I do not condemn those who disagree. I understand those who disagree. I once agreed with those who now disagree with me. It’s not that I became more advanced or more spiritual than those who feel differently. It’s that my experience of reading scripture and praying for the Spirit’s guidance and listening to women who feel called and watching women serve as faithful and effective pastors led me to change my mind. In the words of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15: “It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to me.”
I would only ask those who struggle with or even oppose women as pastors to be careful about forbidding the call of someone else based on your experience and biblical interpretation. We are all fallible human beings who, in the words of Paul, “see through a glass dimly.”
The Bible often asks the question: “Who can know the mind of God? Who can understand God’s ways?” And Jesus said to Nicodemus: “The Holy Spirit blows where it wills,” and to his followers: “The Holy Spirit will lead you into all truth.”
May we always be a prayerful people with open Bibles, open eyes, open minds, and open windows of the heart to allow the Spirit to blow where it wills and lead us into the truth. Amen.