I am beginning to think it really was a sign from God.
I found it in front of The Holy House of Prayer of Jesus Christ (Elder William Butler, presiding). At the end of a string of other announcements about repenting and where you can find them on the radio, the sign read, “God have [sic] never called a woman to preach. Never will.”
The day I
saw it, I knew that sign was for me. It stood in front of a little building with burglar bars deep in one of the most impoverished areas of Georgia — what is known as Frog Holler or Bethlehem — in downtown Augusta.
I will admit that the day I found it, I delighted in that sign. Things like that validate my experience of being a woman in ministry in the South. There is still a remarkable amount of prejudice. I don’t hear it in every conversation, but I’ll admit that over time I have developed more of a suspicion about people’s motives. I have had enough conversations with folks in my church to know that they debate their friends and co-workers regularly on this issue. They defend their church and their pastor admirably. I wish they didn’t have to, but I’m grateful beyond words for their convictions.
I wonder how many people I will never meet, how many opportunities I’ll never even know I missed, because the people I might have known don’t trust my place as a pastor. I have taken way too much time to reflect on this. The inequality exposes something broken in me. I feel trapped. I get angry, defensive. I obsess. I find myself talking about it far too often, with far too much passion. I go beyond good sense. Because I am so darn competitive, I have a hard time making peace with the realities of life.
You know what I want? What I secretly want is for someone to erect a sign that says, “People think this way. It is not just Carolyn’s imagination. This is real. But it is also wrong. It is not an educated response to scripture. It is an injustice and an impediment to the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
That’s what I really want. I want someone to publicly acknowledge what I know to be true.
And that’s why Elder William Butler became my friend when I saw his sign. He has done what I only dreamed of. He put up a sign that pretty much says it all. People think this way. It is not just my imagination. This is real. But it is also wrong. It is not an educated response to scripture.
Elder Butler has exposed the problem magnificently.
Sadly, he has also exposed my heart. His sign is in the poorest part of town, in one of the poorest districts in the state. Rampant crime. Burglar bars on the church building. Deep poverty, serious drug issues. And I took a picture of the sign, and neglected to say so much as a prayer over the community.
Shame on me.
(This post was first published in the early days of my old blog, “Fivestones.” I publish it today as a sort of personal Ebenezer — a place in my life where I remember still an intersection where my brokenness met God’s grace.)
