Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: Another Rip Rant

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Greetings.  Welcome back.  Let me share some more remarkable changes that I see now that I’m back in church.

I am a lot like Rip van Winkle.  Comparing me to Rip van Winkle is no exercise in bombastic arrogance.  Rip despised manual labor.  Although Rip was well liked by just about everyone in town, his wife fussed at him a lot.  More a dreamer than a doer was good old Rip van Winkle. 

Church, such as it has been in my life, seems like a dream from which I awakened.  I have returned older, indeed; wiser, I hope; unchanged in wanting a world where love, justice, peace, and knowledge reign; and always wishing I had the time for taking naps.

Such marvelous changes, I have noted.  I heard a sister preach from the pulpit a few weeks ago.  She preached as well as any man.  She was an ordained Baptist minister.  When I went to seminary in 1982 women were earning their MDivs while many of their classmates were arguing against their ordination—myself being one of the people arguing for women’s ordination. 

I was the only Tennessee Baptist at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary.  Most of the others were from Texas and other Western States.  With few exceptions among my Texas brothers, they were fundamentalists.  Did they feel besieged within a different kind of Alamo? 

They grumbled when they had to read Perrin’s Introduction to the New Testament.  Many did not like to hear that Paul never mentioned Miriam’s virgin birth even though he wrote about Jesus forty years before the writer called Mark wrote the first gospel.

The walls of orthodoxy have always been hard pressed by science.  Modern Biblical scholarship undercuts the superstitious arrogance of fundamentalism and makes us humble. 

For many of my seminary siblings, it was their first exposure to the primacy of Mark and Quelle in synoptic gospel studies.  I had already taken Jewish and Christian Bible in the religion department of a secular university.  I had already worked through much of the pain that comes from having a bastion besieged and broken.

Probably not as bad as all that.  Everyone I met in seminary could have been a good friend had we stayed in the same town.  The Baptist church had changed already, and we didn't know it.  A lot of women, some divorced and some looking for husbands among the men there looking for wives, were earning degrees and were eager to say they wanted to be ordained and to be pastors.

I wondered if the men who resisted the idea of a woman being ordained did so because some women were better preachers or because every one woman who is a pastor means one man who is not. 

The objection based on Bible verses seemed silly to me.  By the time I attended seminary I was well past the enchanting idea that the Bible was one magical book without a single error. 

Thirty years later, I heard a woman preach for the very first time from a pulpit.  It was an epiphany for me.  Next time, I want to share what I saw.

Thanks for visiting.  I hope your day is peaceful and joyful.  Please come back.  Blessings…