Post-Takeover SBC Missions (Part 4): Gender, Missions, and OBU

Post-Takeover SBC Missions (Part 1): A Tragic History

Post-Takeover SBC Missions (Part 2): Resistance Was Futile

Post-Takeover SBC Missions (Part 3): Politics Over Purpose

Part 4 in our series on missions - some brief follow-up thoughts on gender, the SBC, and missions. This post is more of an op-ed than the previous three have been. Taking that into consideration, I think this is an important, albeit somewhat tangential, facet of the story that may help direct us to see some specific effects on OBU.

Historically in Baptist life, the mission field has often been the place where women have gone to fulfill their gifts in ministry when they were not permitted to do so at home due in part to some strange mixture of tradition, misogyny, and imperialistic racism (e.g. man > woman; white woman > “heathen”).

For some reason, it was not (and still is not for fundamentalists) permissible for a woman to lead a church in the West, yet they’d send her around the world by herself to preach (if she’s single) to the “heathen and uncivilized.” I do not note these things to disparage devoted missionaries and their work, but merely to comment on the culture of the time and the social strictures and traditions surrounding the emergence of the global missions movement. The fact that women still in 2012 are not permitted in most SBC-affiliated churches to preach in, much less lead, congregations is also tragic and in my mind the reason there continue to be far more women on the mission field than men where they can realize their spiritual gifts and call to ministry.

            The impact of women’s work, however undervalued it continues to be, has in reality been invaluable.  Many of us have heard of the SBC-affiliated yet self-governing and -funded Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU) - the namesake of a beloved freshman women’s dormitory on OBU’s Oval as well as of the WMU professorship in missions at OBU. It was founded by (Baptist) women for women and is now the largest Christian women’s missions group on the planet. It has also been somewhat successful in defying attempts at external control by the militant leadership of the SBC in recent decades.

            Probably the most well-known Baptist women were missionaries: Annie Armstrong and Lottie Moon. Those of us who were raised in SBC-affiliated churches will likely recognize these names and the corresponding annual fundraising drives which occur during Easter and Christmas which bear their names.

            These women have made a huge impact in Southern Baptist life and in global missions. Since Lottie Moon, a 19^th century missionary in China, appealed to stateside Southern Baptists to set up a Christmas offering for foreign missions, this offering has since raised over one billion dollars for foreign missions.

           

The effect of the fundamentalist take-over of the IMB and Rankin’s new policy -- that missionaries sign in affirmation of the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message and conduct their work according to it -- had consequences even beyond the tragic firing and early retirement of over 100 missionaries and missionary couples. One IMB missionary friend overseas told me that, in her training, it was suggested as an outreach strategy that the male head of family (i.e. her husband) meet with other national male family heads, who, when converted, would initiate a “trickle-down” effect for the rest of the family. The wife was of course still expected to stay at home, raise the kids, and leave much of the real missions work to her husband. Now some couples may choose such an arrangement on their own. But my friend scoffed at the idea as a strategy then and now. She knew that’s not the way things work in the field or with relationships to reach an entire community; and not being raised in the South she was baffled by corresponding attitudes toward gender roles that she encountered in Richmond. It seems like some militant leaders want to export more than simply the Gospel.

The question still remains, however: why is it that the SBC still cannot bring itself to recognize the full God-given value and rights of over half the people in its churches? The 2000 BF&M has made the fundamentalist agenda toward women abundantly clear. To have been included so prominently in such a short document, you’d think the subject of non-ordination of women and female submission was one of their 5 Pillars-Fundamentals or something… but I’m rambling.

            First of all, forget the Whitlock-era administration ever hiring a female professor for Herschel Hobbs the School of Theology and Ministry. (We already know Drs. Norman and McClellan prohibit the hiring of women to teach theology or Bible. Maybe they'd allow a woman to teach children's ministry or missions. How progressive of them!) Secondly, I doubt their new hires are as likely to encourage their female students to pursue God’s gifts of ministry and leadership in their lives if they’re called outside of children’s ministry or missions. I remember well the intellectual and spiritual encouragement I received from a professor who was wrongly dismissed the summer after my graduation.

            It makes me very sad indeed to consider that future classes of Bison won’t experience the same encouragement I and others received if the goals of Provost Norman and BGCO executive director Anthony Jordan are realized.  Gender discrimination in both theology and policy has been one of the primary galvanizing forces for the Save OBU movement.  Two of the blog's most widely circulated posts are about women at OBU (here and here).

Jordan, by the way, chaired the committee that created the “submissive woman” article (Article XVIII) of the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message.

            As militant fundamentalists’ politics were incompatible with missions, so the BGCO’s goals for OBU are incompatible with the academic freedom and rigor required of a Christian liberal arts education like the one OBU was founded to provide. It is difficult to see how these two institutions can be complimentary, much less beneficial for one another in their current relationship. OBU must be made independent from the BGCO, as this tragic story of SBC missions illustrates.