Striking Message Influential Southern Baptist Preacher Bucks Church Position With Support For Women Pastors

Pastor Joe Brown of Hickory Grove Baptist Church loathes politics as much as he loves his east Charlotte congregation of 12,262. He said as much the extraordinary night he spoke out from the pulpit of the Carolinas’ largest Southern Baptist congregation.

He could be a big shot in the Southern Baptist Convention if he wanted to, he told the congregation that Sunday night in June. Hickory Grove Baptist is 15th largest among 41,099 churches in the convention nationwide.

Nearly 600 people join Hickory Grove each year. There’s a satellite campus with 1,100 worshippers and a school with 850 children.

Those kind of numbers add up to political power for the preacher who wants it.

Joe Brown doesn’t.

All he wants, he told 1,500 worshippers that night, is to be a good husband, father and grandfather and to lead a church that refuses, as he put it, “to fight over anything except your soul.”

Brown, 52, told the congregation he had planned to preach on prayer. But then the Southern Baptist Convention got him riled up with its position on female pastors, and suddenly on this Sunday night he changed gears.

Suddenly he was up there taking on the nation’s largest Protestant body, preaching on behalf of all God’s children.

This wasn’t some maverick liberal about to lay into the Southern Baptist Convention. This was one of their own.

“In the entire 16 years I’ve been here,” Brown said at the start of a sermon filled with fire, soul and surprise, “I’ve not brought this stuff into the pulpit. But I just felt like tonight we need to say a little something.”

Brown’s provocation came four days earlier in Orlando, Fla., when 11,830 messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention approved a statement that says “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

The vote came without dissent and, in reality, it won’t change much. Only 35 of the nation’s 41,099 Southern Baptist churches are led by women. The call for men to be in charge is already being heeded at Hickory Grove Baptist, where all 21 pastors and 82 deacons are men.

But from the first moment of a sermon that lasted nearly an hour, it was clear that the Southern Baptist Convention had touched a nerve in Brown; that in rubber-stamping its opposition to female pastors, the convention had challenged the core of his convictions.

And so he did what few other pastors do from the pulpit. He stunned his congregation.

He began by decrying how Southern Baptists have made a mountain out of a molehill, citing Jesus’ words in the Book of Matthew about blind guides who strain at a gnat but swallow a camel.

“When I think that there’s 1 billion people in the world tonight who will go to bed and have never heard the name of Jesus Christ, I think that’s a burning issue,” Brown said.

Then he did what almost every Baptist preacher does every Sunday and Wednesday; he instructed worshippers to open their Bibles.

From Joel to II Kings to Nehemiah to Isaiah to Luke to Acts, Brown played spiritual tour guide, leading his flock from passage to passage, insisting at each stop in God’s book, God stifles no one.

“Now the Bible does not say for women to shut up,” he said, sounding as gentle yet firm as a kindergarten teacher leading children through their ABCs.

“In fact, if you read the Bible, the first people that heard about the Resurrection were women. And the Bible says the angel of the Lord told the women to go and tell the men that Jesus had resurrected.

So, if the women had just shut up and not been a witness like the angel commanded them, we wouldn’t be sitting here tonight.

“When the Gospel was given, when Jesus gave the Great Commission, he didn’t say, `Go, you guys.’ He said, `Go ye.’ And you’re not telling me there wasn’t some ladies standing there.”

Brown was just getting warmed up, standing behind a clear lectern in his double-breasted, dark blue suit, slipping on his glasses so he could get every word from the Bible just right. Every once in a while he moved from one part of the stage to the other, occasionally karate-chopping the air for emphasis.

At one point, he ventured into the lion’s den, confronting the line from I Timothy 2:12 that many use to justify the belief that women can’t preach: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”

Fine, Brown said. But if you’re going to obey one command, shouldn’t you obey them all? Also in I Timothy 2:8-9 is the order for men to pray with their hands in the air and for women to remove their gold and pearls.

“All right, guys, get `em up,” Brown preached, sarcasm dripping. “That’s what it says. All right, take your necklace off. Take `em off. If you’re going to go with the whole thing, the Southern Baptist Convention should have said, `And women will not be allowed to wear necklaces in church.’

“Take it off. I know it’s a cross, but take it off. You’re going to be a good Southern Baptist woman, take the cross off.”

Then Brown got personal.

He’s preaching this sermon for the baby who was dedicated to Christ earlier in the service.

“I’m doing this for that little girl that came up here on this stage, because I want her to be all that she can be under God,” he said. “And I’m not going to tell her that she can’t be all that God - notice I said that, all that God - calls her to be.”

He’s doing this for the young woman who comes to his office and says she feels God calling her into the ministry.

“I’m going to say, “Go for it,”’ Brown said.

He’s doing this for his great-grandmother from the mountains of Virginia, who started a church and became what he called the “hunka hunka in charge” because there was no man around to be the hunka hunka in charge.

“Now are you going to tell me that’s not a duly constituted church?” Brown said. “Because if that’s not of God, then it’s of the devil, and you have just said that my salvation is null and void.”

This is not just about Southern Baptists saying that women cannot be in charge of a congregation, Brown said. This is about the church closing the door on certain people and then putting their shoulder to it to make sure it never opens.

“I don’t think we ought to present people closed doors,” Brown preached to a congregation that barely rustled until the end. “Jesus says, `I present you an open door.’

“You hear what I’m saying?

“And I think we ought to have everything we can to get all of our youth in here and all of our singles in here and all of our college students in here, and we ought to tell them that there’s a great big world out there that needs the gospel of Jesus Christ, and if God calls you into full-time ministry, go.

“And if he doesn’t call you into full-time ministry, then you stay here with us and we’ll take this town for Jesus Christ.”

When he came to Hickory Grove from Whitesburg, Ky., in 1984, Brown told pastoral search committee chairman Max Smith he wanted to hit a home run every time he got in the pulpit.

A former Navy officer who knows how to organize and delegate, Brown has built his ministry on that goal.

Others on staff balance the $10 million annual budget. His job is to care for his wife, Teresa, and their three children, and to preach.

The congregation has boomed on the brilliance of Brown’s singlemindedness even when members don’t agree with his sermons.

“As long as you agree on the main thing, Jesus Christ,” said Elmer Dryden, chairman of Hickory Grove’s board of deacons. “That’s the thread that binds us all.”

Brown’s sermon isn’t likely to change convention policy.

Richard Land, head of the commission that charts the Southern Baptists’ conservative political course, said he hadn’t heard about Brown’s sermon. While he doesn’t doubt that women can be called by God to some tasks, he’s certain they are not called to pastor the local church.

Anyway, Land said, the people have spoken. Only 35 Southern Baptist churches have called a woman to lead them. More than 40,000 have called men.

Brown’s office said he was too busy to talk about the sermon or the Southern Baptist position on women. Though unfailingly friendly, he has never seemed interested in fielding reporters’ calls or grandstanding in the press.

I wouldn’t have known about his sermon if someone hadn’t mailed me a tape recently, with some advice: “Listen to this.”

I did. What I heard was a pastor who grew up with few privileges in little Damascus, Va., a former bag boy at the local grocery store who felt as if he was on the outside looking in most of his life.

If he ever managed to get on the inside, he was going to make sure no one ever felt a door slam shut in their face. If he ever got on the inside, he told the congregation, he was going to make sure people felt what love was like.

“I love this denomination, and I love you,” he preached. “Male, female, Greek or Jew. Asians, Hispanics, black or white. I love you. I don’t care what you look like on the outside. I don’t care how many chromosomes you have. I love you. And I want you to be all that God wants you to be.”

To applause, pastor Joe Brown took his seat that Sunday night at Hickory Grove Baptist Church, having said what he came to say.