Faithful to the Call

EVERY SUNDAY MORNING now, you can find Rev. Nancy Hastings Sehested preaching the Word of God as the senior pastor of a Southern Baptist church.

This is what Nancy Hastings Sehested was born to do. It is who she was created and called to be.

Yet some people would say it is a miracle that has happened, for the road to this place has been long and hard. And surely neither the struggle nor the journey is yet over. But now, those people would say, it is time to marvel at what God has done.

"I am a living testimony to the fact that God is alive and moving in our midst," Nancy says.

But what has happened here in Memphis, Tennessee, is about much more than the call of Nancy Hastings Sehested. It is about women in ministry, power and authority, church autonomy, interpretation of scripture, and the vicious fight for control of the largest Protestant denomination in this country, the 14.7 million-member Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

And it is about how God is bigger than all of that.

PRESCOTT MEMORIAL BAPTIST CHURCH was recently "disfellowshipped"--that is, kicked out for "spiritual" reasons--from its county-wide Southern Baptist association because it called as its pastor a minister who happens to be female. And if you find that hard to believe in 1988, you don't know the half of what's at stake in this Southern Baptist holy war.

For hiring Nancy Sehested as its pastor, Prescott has suddenly found itself in the eye of a denominational hurricane. But while hostile controversy rages all around, Prescott remains calm, steadfast, and even joyful amid the Southern Baptist storm.

"Don't feel sorry for us because we got kicked out of the Shelby County Baptist Association," Prescott members will tell you. "This experience has pulled us together. All we did was be obedient, and we are being blessed. We are witnessing signs and wonders."

The folks at Prescott haven't always talked like this. In fact, they've been known to avoid what they call "God talk." But they have not been able to find any other way to explain what has been happening in their church lately.

"What has happened is astonishing," says Tom Walsh, vice chair of Prescott's board of deacons. "There's no way it was our doing. We set out simply to call a pastor. Then there was this negative, hostile reaction to it. But we remained firm in our conviction....The action of the association may have been an effort to humiliate and isolate us, but I think the result has been just the opposite....

"What has happened is that this little 245-member congregation has been one of the factors that has suited to change the whole direction of the 14.7 million-member denomination," Walsh says.

In their zealous efforts to enforce theological rigidity and cultural conformity by making an example of Prescott and Nancy Sehested, the fundamentalist leaders of the Shelby County Baptist Association have, instead, opened the SBC to widespread criticism and ridicule. News stories, editorials, and editorial cartoons about the Shelby action have appeared in more than 100 newspapers across the country.

Meanwhile, Prescott has received some 500 letters of support from individuals and churches as far away as Alaska. At state Southern Baptist conventions, held two weeks after Shelby's action, the support for Prescott was overwhelming. The Virginia state convention passed a resolution supporting Prescott's authority to call whomever it wanted as its pastor, and the Tennessee state convention refused even to consider affirming the actions of the Shelby County association.

Yet Nancy Sehested and the members of Prescott are just "ordinary" people, and ordinary Southern Baptists at that. They have not gone out of their way to make a statement or to do a great thing. They haven't acted for strategic or political effect. They simply have responded, as faithfully and honestly as they know how, in the only way that seemed right to them, to the call of God and the unique historical moment put before them.

"It has been a watershed experience of leaning back and trusting that God is going to catch me," says 36-year-old Nancy Sehested. "I can walk through the fire, and the fire does not consume. I can stand in the lion's den, and the lions don't eat me up. I can stand before the council, and they can call me names. They can reject me and they can throw me out, but they can never take away my spirit."

IT HASN'T ALWAYS BEEN that way--for Nancy or Prescott Memorial Baptist Church. The daughter and granddaughter of Southern Baptist ministers, Nancy had always felt God's hand on her life; there was something, someone, pulling her forward. She formally committed her life to God's service when she was 16 years old.

But when Nancy first heard and decided to follow her call, she didn't even know what it meant. It wasn't until she went to a non-Baptist seminary up north that she saw women in pastoral roles. That was a revelation. Something clicked. This thing of teaching and preaching and counseling and pastoring seemed to fit with the pull she had felt, the call she had heard. So she followed, never quite sure just where she was being led.

For three years after graduating from seminary, Nancy wandered in the wilderness of the Southern Baptist Convention, unable to find a church that would hire a woman, even as an assistant pastor. It was a difficult and discouraging time, and she doubted herself and her call.

"I think I did what most women in our culture are taught to do," Nancy remembers now. "I blamed myself. I said, 'Well, there must be something wrong with me because I can't find a church to serve in. Maybe I can't really do what I say I can do. Maybe I heard God wrong, maybe God really isn't calling me to ministry....'

"Plus, I'd heard all my life, 'God can use you wherever you are, and if God has called you then God will find a place for you.' Well, of course that's not written in scripture anywhere--that's tradition. And those words were always spoken by male clergy who had a secure position. So it's easy for them to say.

"But as a woman I believed, 'Well, surely God will open a way.' But no doors were opening, and I slowly began to recognize that there are powers and principalities that are at work in our world to block us from answering the call of God in our lives.

"And I would name those powers and principalities as the institutional traditions and forces in the Southern Baptist Convention that do all they can to block women from exercising their call....And this business about 'God can use you wherever you are' smacks right in the face of the fact that God is always calling particular people to a particular place at a particular time....

"So I began to realize that God indeed has a particular call of me, Nancy--Texan, white, middle-class, highly educated, born of two parents, middle daughter of five children, wife of one husband, mother of two daughters. ... And I needed to listen for what that might be but also recognize that there were always going to be barriers to hearing that word because of the present power structures that are in control."

Nancy Hastings Sehested stayed on the road and kept following her call to be a pastor, and in 1981 she was called as associate pastor of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, Georgia. She ministered there for six years and then left, feeling God was calling her on to something else yet. Nancy didn't know where or what it was, she just knew it was time to move on.

MEANWHILE, PRESCOTT Memorial Baptist Church had started looking for a new pastor. Throughout its 71-year history, Prescott had managed to live out the gospel in what some people would call a countercultural fashion. That had never been Prescott's primary goal, but as its members tried to apply the gospel to such modern-day issues as racism, sexism, social justice, and war and peace, they often found that what they understood to be the biblical perspective on something was quite different than how society at large--and even other Southern Baptists--understood it.

In 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed at a Memphis hotel and the nation was rife with racial conflict, Prescott became the first Southern Baptist church in the Memphis area to integrate. Church members hadn't planned it that way, but a black college student presented himself for membership, and, after a divisive debate, the church voted to receive him. At the time Prescott had some 1,700 members; during the next few years, it would lose more than 1,000 members over "the race issue."

In 1970, Prescott became the first Southern Baptist church in the Memphis area to ordain women as deacons, and in 1983 Prescott became the first Baptist church in Tennessee to maintain a joint affiliation with the American Baptist Churches, USA. Today about 10 percent of Prescott's 245 members are black; it still is the only Southern Baptist church in Memphis with women deacons; and a day-care center, food pantry, and about 10 other organizations share the Prescott building.

Prescott's record is one many Christians would see as evidence of a church that is dedicated to living out the full gospel message. But what the Shelby County Baptist Association saw at Prescott was a bunch of troublemakers. So when Prescott hired a woman as its pastor, it only reinforced its negative reputation among the 120 Memphis-area churches belonging to the association and their 400 (all male) delegates.

Of course, Prescott hadn't set out with the intention of hiring a female pastor. Members of the church's search committee were charged simply to find the pastor that best suited Prescott's needs. One of the more than 80 applications Prescott's search committee received was from Nancy Hastings Sehested. What members of the search committee didn't know was that she had very little interest in pastoring an established Southern Baptist church in Memphis, Tennessee.

By the time Nancy left her position as associate pastor at Oakhurst, she had just about given up on the institutional church. She was discouraged by the amount of time and energy it took just to keep the institution and all its programs alive. She had begun to doubt whether it was possible to build up the people of God and to feed their spirits in the midst of running scores of programs and doing hundreds of good things. It often felt like the institution just sucked the life right out of people--including pastors.

Nancy was also concerned about the pastoral role. "Most of the pastors I have seen are either workaholics or they are the CEOs [chief executive officers] of the church or they are dictators or rulers," she says. Nancy wanted to be able to pastor a church, study and pray, and still be committed to her family. Her husband, Ken, is executive director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America. Daughters Jessica and Alayna are 11 and 7.

Then there was the hierarchy problem. "I wanted to see a model [of church] where people sensed that we were in this together, and that the pastor or staff person was not doing it for the people, but that the pastor was really in a position to empower the people," Nancy explains.

But, even with all her concerns, as well as her hope of being hired to direct a North Carolina retreat center, Nancy applied for the Prescott job. She thought an application from a woman would give the Prescott people "something to think about."

As it turned out, Prescott's search committee was thinking about Nancy's application quite a bit; every time it narrowed its field of candidates, she was still in the running. Her gifts seemed just what Prescott needed. Committee members were especially attracted to her deep sense of spirituality. To Nancy's great surprise, the committee members even shared her concerns and respected her desires to do things differently. Nancy was beginning to feel confused.

But still there was the Memphis problem. Memphis to Nancy Sehested was as Nineveh to Jonah--full of sin and not the least bit appealing. Memphis was where Martin Luther King was killed and where that other "king," Elvis Presley, lived and died.

Prescott's search committee had narrowed its field of pastoral candidates to six. "It just so happened that three of them were men and three of them were women," says Betty Dawson, chair of the board of deacons and a member of the committee. Committee members drove to Jackson, Mississippi, to hear Nancy, the last of the six, preach.

After that Nancy was more confused than ever and decided to call the retreat center in North Carolina to see what was happening there. The answer was no; there was a funding problem. Devastated, Nancy left home for a two-day retreat in the mountains. When she returned, she felt her hands were empty. She would be open to whatever God had in store.

Meanwhile, Prescott's search committee had a decision to make, and no one expected it to be quick or easy. But when committee head Ralph Chumbley asked each member to eliminate one candidate, every member said the church should call Nancy as its new pastor. "It really was a call," Chumbley says. "It had to be the Holy Spirit."

They invited Nancy to preach at Prescott on August 23, 1987. In a private business meeting after worship, 83 percent of Prescott's members voted to call Nancy Hastings Sehested as the church's new pastor. There were three negative votes and three abstentions.

Nancy, both thrilled with the offer and amazed at the change in her own heart, accepted the call. She would be installed as Prescott's pastor on November 1, All Saint's Day.

"I think it took a pretty big miracle for me even to get to a place where I was willing to hear of this as a possibility," Nancy says. "It wasn't until I finally met people that I started thinking, 'My gosh, these really are wonderful people. They have a life that shows risk and a life that shows grace, and they're already God's people....They are already experiencing the fullness of God's life in their midst, and I'd like to travel with them.'"

IT HAD OCCURRED TO Prescott members that their calling of a woman pastor might raise a few Southern Baptist eyebrows. For 10 years conservative Southern Baptists had been working to cleanse SBC seminaries, boards, and churches of all staff members who didn't follow the fundamentalist line, and the role of women in ministry had been a particularly sore point.

At its 1984 annual meeting, the SBC had adopted a resolution opposing women's ordination, saying that a woman (Eve) had been the first to sin and that scripture prohibited women from having authority over men. But Prescott read the scriptures differently, and saw no reason women could not be pastors. Prescott also knew that SBC resolutions are non-binding and that the Southern Baptist heritage upholds the priesthood of all believers and the autonomy of the local congregation.

So Prescott went ahead and called Nancy Sehested as its pastor, making her only the fourth woman now serving as senior pastor of a Southern Baptist church. Of some 450 Southern Baptist women ordained for the ministry, only 11 serve as pastors or co-pastors of the SBC's 36,000 congregations. By hiring Nancy, Prescott became the largest Southern Baptist church pastored by a woman.

In some cities and towns, Prescott's hiring of a woman pastor might have gone unnoticed. But Memphis is the home of SBC president Adrian Rogers and his 17,000-member Bellevue Baptist Church, and unorthodoxy rarely goes unchallenged in "Mr. Rogers' neighborhood."

On September 21, the executive board of the Shelby County Baptist Association directed the association's credentials committee to investigate Prescott's "doctrinal soundness," noting that Prescott's calling of a female minister is "an irregularity that may threaten the fellowship" of the association. Prescott members were informed of the action when a newspaper reporter asked them for comments.

As part of its investigation, the Shelby credentials committee met with Prescott representatives. In response to the committee's request, Prescott members had prepared a 13-page paper analyzing scripture passages concerning the role of women and reporting on the history of women in the Baptist church.

"They were really surprised that we had a scriptural basis for calling a woman pastor," Walsh says. "What it shows is that when someone disagrees, they assume that we're not spiritual or that we're not Christian."

Prescott changed Nancy Sehested's starting date to Oct. 18 so she could be one of Prescott's three messengers to the Oct. 19 Shelby meeting, where the credentials committee would report on its investigation of Prescott. Nancy realized at that meeting that because members of the association didn't know her, she was not being seen as a "real human being."

"They were seeing me as an issue to be battled against," Nancy says. "I was certainly grieved that the association showed such enormous hostility, but it was a time in which I felt really empowered to act."

At first, things looked good for Prescott. The credentials committee said that, since the association had no guidelines specifying which "irregular" church practices warranted expulsion from the association, no action should be taken against Prescott until such guidelines were drawn up. But that is not what Shelby's fundamentalist leadership wanted to hear. It rejected the committee's report and made a motion to withdraw fellowship from Prescott.

While the motion was being debated, Nancy Sehested went to a microphone to speak. Immediately a motion was made to close debate. Calmly, Nancy noted that since she was the center of the controversy she should be allowed to speak. "Too late, too late. You can't speak," male voices shouted at her. Then Adrian Rogers intervened, saying that even though he intended to vote against Prescott. the association "out of Christian courtesy should allow the lady to speak."

With her Bible in hand, Nancy walked up the aisle of the auditorium and stood at the pulpit. "That evening was one in which I was especially aware that it was not by my power that I was even able to stand in front of that group....I decided to trust the verse that says, 'When you stand before the council, the Spirit will intercede on your behalf and give you the words that you are to speak.'"

Nancy spoke extemporaneously for about 10 minutes (see "By What Authority Do I Preach?") and then watched as 80 percent of the association members voted to disfellowship Prescott for having hired her.

GETTING KICKED OUT of the Shelby County Baptist Association just might be the best thing that ever happened to Prescott Memorial Baptist Church. "Ever since that moment that they kicked us out, we have been in a spirit of celebration," says Betty Dawson.

The only thing the people at Prescott can figure out is that they must be doing the right thing. "Somebody's leading us," Larry Brake, a church deacon, says. Jean Hofacket, who recently moved to Memphis, joined Prescott because she "saw a church that is open to God's leading and doesn't put any limits on where God leads."

If the expulsion from the Shelby association had created any doubts or second thoughts in the minds of Prescott members, they were completely erased by the "miraculous" events surrounding Nancy's November 1 installation service. Two days before the service, Nancy came down with a virus and couldn't talk; the doctor said it would be at least a week before she regained her voice. But the congregation prayed, and on Sunday morning Nancy preached.

And Betty Dawson had been looking for a robe for Nancy to wear at the installation service, something the congregation could rent since it couldn't afford to buy one. But when Dawson told the tailor in inner-city Memphis where to deliver the rental robe, he realized who it was for and insisted on making her a robe of her very own--free of charge. Leonard Small Jr. sewed for two days and nights, and that Sunday morning Nancy wore a beautiful royal-blue robe.

NANCY HASTINGS SEHESTED didn't want to come to Memphis; she didn't want to pastor a church. But this is where God led her, and she's glad she followed.

"The walk of faith is not one of looking for ways to create controversy or to stir up trouble," Nancy says. "The walk of faith is trying to be as faithful as you can to your understanding of God in your life. And I think that's what Prescott and I were doing. ...

"And as a byproduct of that faithfulness it did stir up an enormous amount of controversy. And it happened in Memphis, in the shadow of the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, to speak a word to all women in the Southern Baptist Convention that we are unwanted. We had already received that message, but the powers-that-be wanted to make it clear that women ministers are unwanted and there's no interest in finding a place for us to serve."

But Nancy has "received a tremendous amount of support from people at Prescott. We have prayed together, and we've kept a sense of humor alive. ...There's been a lot of joy along the way because I think that all of us have really felt a sense of Tightness about our coming together. There's been joy in that finding of each other. ...

"So what we've experienced at Prescott is that we are grieved...but not defeated. Persecuted, but not struck down. So there's just been a lot of hope in these days....There's all kinds of hope when you really feel like God's right smack in the middle of all this and has done all kinds of things to pull you together."

REV. NANCY HASTINGS SEHESTED is preaching. Hardly towering above the pulpit at a slight 5 feet 2 inches, she somehow comes across as tall and stately and strong. She wears a royal blue robe and a colorful Central American stole.

This is the second Sunday of Advent, and the sermon text for the day is taken from the first chapter of the gospel of Luke. It is the story of Gabriel, "God's angel who specialized in birth announcements," and Mary, a young virgin receiving some good, but nevertheless shocking, news. Her first response is, understandably, "How can this be?"

"The God of surprise is fast at work," Nancy says. This God found and used such unlikely persons as Moses, Abraham, Peter, Mary, and Paul, "and God found you and me in surprising ways, too."

She asks the listening church members, "On the way to find a pastor had you been praying day and night for a, female pastor?" Hearty laughter fills the sanctuary. "And had I been praying about coming to Memphis?" Once again there is laughter. "No!"

"I had it all figured out," she says. "But I kept getting this tap on my shoulder, begging me to listen, beckoning me to Memphis and a people called Prescott. And, like Mary, I was afraid...afraid of preaching every week ... afraid of creating a controversy in the church...

"But the voice kept beckoning me on ... and the hand on my shoulder became an arm around me for support....I kept hearing words that said, 'I am with you....Do not be afraid.'...

"Like Mary," she says to her church, "we heard our names. Like Mary, we were shocked and surprised. ...But, like Mary, we responded to God's words as faithfully as we knew how....God has surprised us and called us together."

Vicki Kemper was news editor at Sojourners when this article appeared.