Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 16:4 (Fall 2002)
Article: Past, Present, Promise: What I’ve Learned In Forty Years About Women In Ministry.
Author: David M. Scholer

PP 16:4 (Fall 2002) p. 12

Past, Present, Promise: What I’ve Learned In Forty Years About Women In Ministry.

David M. Scholer

David M. Scholer is professor of New Testament and associate dean for the Center for Advanced Theological Studies, School of Theology, at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. He was previously on the faculty of North Park Theological Seminary and North Park College, Chicago; Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Lombard, IL; and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, MA.

The following article is adapted from a paper the author presented at the American Baptist Churches Women in Ministry Biennial Breakfast on June 22, 2001, in Providence, Rhode Island.

I want to share with you my personal reflections on my forty years’ involvement with women in ministry, trusting that I am old enough and have been at it long enough that such personal reflection is not in poor taste.

From John R. Rice To Paul King Jewett

My journey began almost fifty years ago in the fundamentalist church that was the context for my early development in the faith. A voracious reader and curious about theology, by the time I was fifteen I had read John R. Rice’s 1941 classic, Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers: Significant Questions for Honest Christian Women Settled by the Word of God.1 I was a good fundamentalist Baptist boy who knew the place of women!

Still, in my high school years I had private, unvoiced doubts about three aspects of my context: the place of women in the church; the pretribulational, millennial, literalistic eschatology; and ecclesiastical separationism. I once went with two friends to their Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod Sunday morning worship, and I reported to my pastor that, to my great surprise, I discovered that they worshiped and honored Jesus Christ. My pastor declared: “Son, do not be deceived; the words may be the same, but they have a completely different meaning!”

When I went off to college, I enrolled in New Testament Greek, determined to find answers to my private theological doubts and questions. A long journey must here be compressed. By 1960 I married my wife, Jeannette, a wonderfully strong, intelligent woman. By 1962 I had two years of formal theological education behind me, had become an American Baptist, shed my dispensationalism, and written in a seminary paper that I could find no biblical reason to exclude women from any form of the ministry.

As naive and uninformed as I then was, I had become, within my social and theological context, a kind of “radical” on the issue of women in ministry. Jeannette’s reading in 1963, the year of its publication...