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SARAH JACKSON SHELTON Find a Supportive Church
It did not take long for Sarah Jackson Shelton to find out how certain parties felt about her 2002 appointment as senior pastor of the Baptist Church of the Covenant in Birmingham--and thus one of the few female Southern Baptist pastors in Alabama. She had been on the job about a week when the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (S.B.C.) rejected two of her congregants' applications to do missionary work in Swaziland. The convention's grounds: their refusal to sign a belief statement that says women should not serve as pastors, a view rooted in such biblical verses as Paul's observation that "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence." Technically, admits S.B.C. official Richard Land, "we can't tell a church who to hire." But by the same token, he says, "that woman's church cannot tell the International Mission Board who it can send on its missions."
If S.B.C. leaders hoped that the sanction would shame "that woman," however, they were wrong. "Paul did have some pretty rigid things to say" about women, the Rev. Shelton admits. "But you have to consider it in historical context. Paul also said in Galatians, 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.'"
The daughter of a renowned pastor, Shelton, 47, was encouraged by a professor to preach at one of the S.B.C.'s seminaries before its hard rightward turn starting in 1979. After long stints in such typical "women's jobs" as education minister and associate pastor, she had a difficult conversation with God in 1999. "I'd been in the ministry for about 20 years, and I still didn't have a pulpit," says the mother of two sons. "I expressed to the Lord that I was going to retire early and let another generation be called." But the following year, Covenant Baptist offered her an interim post that she later lobbied to be made permanent.
It was a good match. Covenant was founded in 1970 during an earlier inclusion controversy, when 250 members of Birmingham's First Baptist Church walked out to protest its denial of membership to a black applicant. Shelton, says deacon Orbie Medders, is "an outstanding preacher and pastor. And she has a nurturing side to her that is stronger than anything I have ever seen in a man. She sets a tremendous example in terms of a broader spectrum of unconditional love, in the way she loves all who come seeking Christ."
Shelton likes her job, although she says it is not without its sorrows. She mentions the illness and death of congregants: "You get close to it," she says. And then there is what she calls her "professional sadness," to "realize the slow changes that occur in churches, the lack of openness to accept those who may be different, when we could focus on sharing what we have in common."
CAROL ANDERSON Put Faith Before Politics