Dr. Sheri Adams is Professor of Church History and Theology in Gardner-Webb University’s M. Christopher White School of Divinity. In her essay, Gardner-Webb and “The Baptist Way”, Dr. Adams describes Gardner-Webb University’s Baptist foundation and identifying characteristics as it relates to women in ministry.
Most of the people reading this essay almost surely know the history of the founding of what became Gardner Webb University: that the school we enjoy today began as a Baptist high school for young men preparing for the ministry. That fact, in itself, would have set Boiling Springs High School apart in its day, as Baptists were not known at that point in their history as being particularly keen on ministers getting an education. When Baptists began as a separate “people” emerging from the chaos of the Reformation, they insisted at first that ministers have nothing written with them in the pulpit. The Spirit was expected to supply what was needed at the time it was needed. It was only after the Spirit provided what came to be called, “the raw and undigested parts,” that Baptists began to come to grips with the fact that it might be permissible to study and prepare.
The very fact that I am a woman who is teaching men and women in the divinity school of Gardner Webb University tells the informed reader what kind of Baptist school Gardner Webb is. In its own way, Gardner Webb University is as distinctive today as Boiling Springs High School was in its day. There are Baptist schools in which women are now being told that there is a whole host of things that they, as women, should not do. Unfortunately, most of the things on the list are things that prevent a woman from being all she can be. This issue is very close to my heart , because I know a woman who was told by a church made up of Baptists like that that she did not need to go to school and get an education, or be prepared to support herself because God’s will for her was marriage and children. She took that advice to heart, skipped college and went right to work in a low-paying job. Without an education, that was all that was available. Thirty years have gone by. She did not marry and have children. Neither did she get an education because she continued to believe that she was not going to need one. All of her work life has been spent in low paying jobs because she was told getting an education and working was not God’s will for her by people who were supposed to speak for God.
One of the things a person notices at Gardner Webb is how many very bright and articulate women we have in the student body. I am proud that we are a school that encourages them to make the most of what they have been given and it is a joy to see them do just that. It is foolish, to me, unthinkable, to tell a woman she will never need to be able to support herself. In fact, I am convinced we should be conveying to them that they must be prepared to do just that, as most of them will need to work most of their lives.
For me, Gardner Webb’s approach to the so-called, “women’s issue,” highlights the best of what might be called the “Baptist way.” No Baptists would claim that a woman does not have to meet God through faith in Christ and confess her faith as an individual, but some would then claim to know what God can or can’t, will or won’t, do in the woman’s life. We don’t do this at Gardner-Webb. We believe that women can interpret God’s working in their lives for themselves. We believe that women are free to use the gifts that God has given them in service to the church in any capacity. We do this because we are Baptists, who embrace the Baptist distinctive of autonomy, priesthood of the believer and soul liberty.
