The Slow Way: The Silencing of Women. The Yes of God.

I left the Southern Baptist Church because when I was thirteen God asked me if I would leave everything. And I said yes.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

I was thirteen years old, the summer after eighth grade, when God invited me to be a pastor. That’s the phrase I would use now. Then, I would have told you I “received a call” to ministry. I spent years wondering if that is what really happened that morning. If I made it up. If I understood myself or the voice of God enough to certify any sort of miraculous presence hovering over my awkward, nearly-adolescent body (all skinny legs), sitting criss-cross on my white and gold daybed on a Tuesday in July 1993. But eventually, after four years of hesitations, prayers, and replays of the moment in my mind, I stopped asking if it was real, and instead asked myself what I was going to do about it. 

“Receiving a call” was something that happened to boys and girls differently in the Southern Baptist Church. And I knew that. I knew what God was allowed to say and not allowed to say to me. And whatever it was that God was asking, I believed I had no choice. I had to do what God was telling me to do. Thirty years later, I see how many beautiful choices I actually did have, how my invitation was always a lifelong river that could stream out so many different ways.

That morning I was reading the Bible, even then fascinated by the stories, the possibilities of a God who shows up in the mess of the human experience and makes something beautiful of our quick and wild lives. I was reading in Genesis, that early story of Isaac and Rebekah, the woman chosen by Isaac’s servant, and by God apparently–-based on how she showed up at the right place at the right time and was willing to get water for some thirsty camels—to leave her family and all she had known to marry a man in another country in order to propel the story of God. When given the opportunity, Rebekah says yes. 

Yes, that word swelled inside me all on its own, as if it wasn’t of my own doing. As if the keeper of my heart were stretching it to move beyond its small knowing so wide it might burst out of my body. Yes. 

I was only thirteen. What did I know about a heart bursting open? What did I know about the Spirit undoing my plans and giving me new ones? 

Would you say yes? The swelling word asked me. If you had to leave everyone and everything you knew? Would you say yes, simply because I asked you? 

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This week the Southern Baptist Convention voted to expel any churches with female pastors from its communion, as well as expanding further restrictions on women in church leadership. This probably didn’t come as a shock to most of us who chose to leave the Southern Baptist Church over the past twenty or so years. And still, there are plenty of women like me, who left the denomination long ago, before its embrace of Trumpism, before its disclosure of decades of covered up sexual abuse, who are finding this last grasp of fundamentalist interpretation of scripture and its silencing of women’s voices deeply troubling. I am watching from the sidelines holding tenderness for my thirteen year old self, and all she dreamed of being, all the Yeses God invited her to hold. All the nos her church insisted were her birthright. 

Some people leave the denomination of their childhood and move along to new ways of worship with very little loss. I haven’t been that person. I have grieved the loss of my childhood church. I have worked through the trauma of that loss in therapy. I have come to release that my gifts and my callings could never be in line with the brand of Christianity passed down through the culture of my religious tradition.

I didn’t know this until my thirties, but this is the truth. I left the Southern Baptist Church because when I was thirteen God asked me if I would leave. And I said yes.

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I spent the past three years researching and writing a book on the Beatitudes. I did this without a seminary degree. I used a seminary library that I’m grateful my part-time job in ministry made more easily available to me. I found books, made notes, read footnotes and bought the books by authors in the footnotes. This has been how I’ve always given myself a theological education. And maybe someday I’ll go to seminary for real. But I think about the years that I could have done such a thing, and what it would have been like to have shown up as a boy with my gifts in a church—my love for speaking and teaching, my love for scripture, my sense of a calling to ministry. I would have been sent to seminary by my home church. I would have been prayed for. I would have been given a scholarship. I know these things. I think about them still, because I would have loved to have been a pastor. And I believe God invited me to be a pastor.

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I was twenty-two and on my way to study for the month in Kenya and South Africa for a graduate course with one of the Bible professors at Hardin-Simmons University, where I had completed my undergrad, a Southern Baptist University, with a then-thriving seminary. (It’s since been shut down by conservative donors as have many Baptist higher learning institutions deemed too liberal in the past several years.) I would be moving to the northeast for graduate school in just two months to study creative writing, and I was telling my professor’s wife, who I deeply admired, that I wasn’t planning to stay in the Baptist Church. 

“We need women like you, Micha” she said. “Who can push back on traditional teaching around women in leadership. Please stay. You can be a voice.”

I didn’t. I think of that sometimes, when I recite the liturgy in my ecumenical church, more influenced by the Episcopal tradition than anything I grew up with. I think about how far my children’s experience of church and theology is from what I knew in my childhood. 

And I think about that other life. The one where I came to my youth leader, my heart still racing, filled with the Holy Spirit’s “yes” in me, and my “yes” in return. “Lord,” I had prayed, “I’m afraid. I don’t know if I could do it, if I could leave everything and everyone and go where you want me to go. But if you want me to do it, help me be brave.” 

Maybe in another world, I would have been acknowledged as uniquely gifted for the service of the Church. Maybe I could have been seen as more than a good pastor’s wife, a nice single-missionary, a pleasant children’s director. But I had to leave to find out that the Yes the Spirit whispered in me was louder than any interpretation of scripture, any oppressive resistance toward my leadership, and any quieting of God’s voice inside me. 

And, today, my anger and hurt and frustration that the community of believers that loved me and and taught me to sing the hymns I still hum to the plants in my garden, are taking more steps to silence the little girls in their pews, I am grateful to be reminded that God’s Yes can’t be silenced. In fact, wasn’t it Paul, the same apostle whose words about female silence are used to keep women sidelined, who also said that in Christ there is neither “Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.” And wasn’t it Paul who said that in Christ every one of God’s promises is “Yes”? 

For all of the silenced, all of the rejected, all of those who could have been. And for the little girls, the LGBTQ+ teens, and the restless doubters striving to find faith in a church that refuses to acknowledge God’s Yes in you? 

Hold on a little longer, love. Let that yes grow a little wider. There is no stopping the Spirit of God. No church policy, no abuse cover up, and no human notions of power can silence the voice of Love’s Yes in you.

A Slow Practice

As Martin Laird reminds us in his book Into the Silent Land, as he describes why the early Christian contemplatives began practicing the use of a “prayer word”: 

“Our bodies may be at the place of prayer, but our minds are usually not where our bodies are, but instead are at a shopping mall; on a beach in Majorca; reliving an argument; fearing the future; regretting the past; any place but here in the present moment . . . The desert contemplatives saw this mind tripping all too clearly in their own lives and took to heart Jesus’ example of refraining from inner dialogue with the afflictive thoughts. Instead of talking to yourself, recite, as Jesus did, a short phrase from Scripture.” 

Today we’re going to sit in silence for five minutes. Get yourself a timer if that helps. And as you sit still we’re going to use two of the tools we’ve been practicing around here: breathing and the use of a prayer word. 

As your timer begins, allow yourself to take long deep breaths. I’ve mentioned before that box breathing is a helpful way for me to focus on my breaths. You can read about it here. If you’re more of a numbers person and imagining your breaths moving slowly around a box doesn’t help you, try a different technique. Just breathe in for six seconds and breathe out for six seconds. 

We’re going to practice deep breathing for five minutes and while we do so I want you to hold your prayer in the center of you—just one word or phrase.  As your mind starts to wander, just come back to this word and remember to stretch your breathing out. 

Your word is “Yes” as in 2 Corinthians 1:20: “In [Christ] every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.’” If it helps to repeat “every one of God’s promises is yes,” instead of sitting simply with the word “yes,” feel free to do so.  The point of this exercise is to allow yourself room to sit with the mystery of God’s “yes” in your life. Where is the Spirit offering you freedom and joy? Where is there a door opening that you may have missed before? Where have you been hurt by religion’s no, while God has been holding the promise of yes right there for you all along? 

Give yourself five minutes, friend. Let’s sit in silence.

Let’s close with this prayer: 

Oh Divine One of the Yes, release me from the no’s that have tied my heart up and kept my gifts quiet. Lead me into the wide open promises of your limitless love. Amen.