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Smiling women on the cover of a slick magazine. Sold from under the counter. Must request it from store clerk. That's not something a buyer would typically find in a Christian bookstore.
Not unless it's one of the more than 100 Lifeway Christian Bookstores across the United States, including about six in metro Atlanta.
Gospel Today, the Fayetteville-published magazine, was pulled off the racks by the bookstores' owner, the Southern Baptist Convention. The problem? The five smiling women on the cover are women of the cloth -- church pastors.
Southern Baptist polity says that's a role reserved for men.
Teresa Hairston, owner of Gospel Today, whose glossy pages feature upbeat articles about health, living, music and ministry, said she discovered by e-mail that the September/October issue of the magazine had been demoted to the realm of the risque.
"It's really kind of sad when you have people like [Gov.] Sarah Palin and [Sen.] Hillary Clinton providing encouragement and being role models for women around the world that we have such a divergent opinion about women who are able to be leaders in the church," Hairston said. "I was pretty shocked."
Chris Turner, a spokesman for Lifeway Resources, which runs the stores for the Southern Baptist Convention, said, "It is contrary to what we believe."
It bases those beliefs on their interpretation of New Testament Scriptures.
Southern Baptist representatives at national meetings have adopted statements saying women should not be pastors, but each church is independent. A few churches have selected women, such as Decatur First Baptist, where the Rev. Julie Pennington-Russell preaches each Sunday from the pulpit.
Pastor Tamara Bennett of California is one of the featured pastors on the magazine cover and talks in the article about the challenges of breaking through the stained-glass ceiling.
"God's assignment is that no souls are lost and all are saved," Bennett said. "Gender is not how God sees it. We are about winning souls, period."
Southern Baptists are not the only ones to frown on women preachers. Catholics, the largest Christian denomination in the nation, do not allow women priests. And some conservative evangelical groups, such as the Presbyterian Church in America, do not ordain women.
"We weren't trying to pick a fight," Hairston said. "We just did a story on an emerging trend in a lot of churches."
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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It's amazing how so-called Christian strain at a gnat but swallow a camel. Christianity is supposed to be about Christ, not about who is in the pulpit.
I think the SBC needs to re-evaluate their basic position. No passage of Scripture expressly forbids women in general from being head pastors. In the OT, there were female prophets like Deborah who did exercise a level of authority over ALL Israel, not just the women and children.
In the NT there are indications that women did have leadership roles, such as Phoebe, who, in the Greek of Rom. 16:1, is clearly called a "deacon" (Greek, diakonos).
We can get fooled by translations that make Phoebe a "servant," but we need to be more diligent than a mere blind allegiance to what others translate for us.