Not in Our Church

Chapter 1 explores the tensions that arose in southern evangelicalism between local church congregations and state- and nation-level bodies in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision. Such tensions reveal how Southern Baptists and Methodists negotiated the heightened antagonism emerging between denominational leaders and the people in the pews over civil rights in the mid-1950s. The chapter opens with South Carolina Southern Baptist churches rejecting broader Southern Baptist Convention efforts to advocate for civil rights in religious language and concludes with lay South Carolina Methodists defending the White Citizens’ Councils against criticism from a small number of Methodist clergy. Both these studies reveal the effective authority of local congregations in directing southern white churches’ responses to matters of race in the civil rights years. This chapter highlights that the congregational-level perspective gives the best vantage point for understanding white evangelicalism’s response to the civil rights movement, regardless of church polity.

Living Testaments: How Catholic and Baptist Women in Ministry Both Judge and Renew the Church

In 2014 women constituted 15.8% of u.s. clergy. They led 10% of u.s. congregations. While the numbers have increased dramatically in fifty years, this data invites a deeper question. What does women’s entry into ministry (lay and ordained) mean for ecclesiology, the life and doctrines of the church? Four case studies from two qualitative investigations of ministry illustrate women’s pastoral leadership from the margins of Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist churches, showing how women called to ministry are: living testaments to a renewed vision for church that embraces the fullness of humanity; living judgments on harms and shortcomings of the church; embodied revisions to ecclesial practices. Each case study bears witness to situated possibility of the Spirit’s work; exposes and challenges sins of sexism; shows every day dilemmas over resisting and subverting power; and reframes doctrine and practice from the margins, renewing ecclesial vision for the church.