#it's not like i wish i'd become a conservative small town pastor

[etraytin]

I cut ties with the evangelical church I grew up in a long time ago, but my parents still attend regularly. I was talking to them the other day and they were sad because the longtime senior pastor (my youth pastor once upon a time and the person who officiated my wedding) was leaving for another church. I asked who the new pastor was going to be, and they named one of the associate pastors, a guy my age who I went to youth group with back in the late nineties.

Now this guy has been a pastor there for years now, and he's okay but he's not great. My folks are not thrilled and I understand why. I never disliked the guy back when we ran in the same circles, but he would not have been my choice for "Most likely to be a non-music pastor." We were on the youth group's ministry team together, a group of teenagers who were basically the "inner circle" of a pretty large youth program. He liked to play guitar and he liked to be on the stage and he liked to have people like him. It's not a bad thing. But when it came to people who were doing the work of the church and engaging with the scriptures on a thoughtful level and who would've been capable of putting together a sermon and delivering it, I'd have put at least a half dozen names ahead of his. But it never mattered, because most of the teens on ministry team were girls, and we didn't count.

See, Evangelicals then and now have a strict rule that says women cannot be pastors in the church. They can be support staff, they can run the office and run the children's programming and the hospitality and the benevolence ministry and pretty much everything that is the work of the church, but they cannot be pastors. And because of this, none of the bright, intelligent, erudite girls in my ministry team were ever cultivated for actual ministry except as musicians. They just let all that talent go, and now twenty years later, they are completely unconscious of the fact that they're just reaping what they sowed.

And my feelings about this are so complicated because I went to a liberal college and I became socially and politically liberal and I divorced my church and I am glad all of that happened. I wouldn't want to have the beliefs I had back then. But if the leaders of my church had looked at me back in 1999 and looked past my gender, maybe none of that would've happened, and maybe I'd have become a pastor. I think I'd have been a good one.