When I started seminary, I struggled with the classes where we were invited to share our “call stories.” I didn’t feel like I had one, per se. I’d had experiences that led me to believe that seminary, and ministry might be a good fit.
I was raised on the mission field in Brazil, South America, and thus my playtime consisted of preaching to my stuffed animals and serving them saltines and grape juice for communion.
Until halfway through my freshman year of college, I was going to be a concert pianist. Turns out, even though during the World Cups, I’ve been known to be less than my best via competitive energy, I wasn’t competitive or cutthroat enough for a degree in piano performance. I found a home in Social Work, then briefly in child welfare; and finally, in elder care. My experience as a Recreation Therapy Assistant made me interested in ways to meld my faith and Social Work into a meaningful vocation. Chaplaincy, evidently, was a way forward so I enrolled in seminary. I was fully invested in becoming a hospice chaplain.
Until I took a required preaching class. Kicking and screaming, I enrolled, because I had to. I preached my first sermon ever (to real people, not stuffed animals, that is), because I had to… and the rest of the sermons I preached in serminary and beyong, I preached because I wanted to.
Because I felt called to preach.
BECAUSE I CAN.
I wrote my capstone on including adults with dementia in church community life, and my first call, Scott Boulevard Baptist Church, was spent creating a ministry of home worship for many senior adults who could not physically be included, in the traditional way, in church community life. Once every 4-6 weeks I got to preach, because it was important to my pastor to foster that skill with me. Thank God for him, and the congregation that allowed me to be my full, woman pastor self.
When I think about calling and call stories, I actually can pinpoint one. It was the moment behind the pulpit in the preaching classroom, in my first preaching class, when I was halfway through my sermon. I moved from dread, to discomfort, to acceptance, to energized. My classmates’ smiles and encouragement, my professor’s affirmation, the process of becoming myself, in my own body, and with my own voice allowed me to receive and accept, a calling to use my voice to bring hope to the world around me, one sermon at a time.
I’m grateful for the nurturing I’ve received along my ministry journey, and the support that has upheld me all this years. I’m heartbroken and livid that there are women who are being told by entitled white men that a woman being called to pastor, and having the world “pastor” in her title, doesn’t make sense.
Well, SBC, it doesn’t have to make sense.
You don’t have to understand my calling, you don’t have to agree with people at work calling me “Pastor Sara.” You don’t have to come to my church, or listen to my sermons. You don’t have to like me.
But, you can’t take that moment that is forever housed in my memory away from me.
You can’t change the fact that I get to preach every Sunday, in my own voice.
You can keep voting on my legitimacy as a pastor, but you can’t deligitimize it, not really. And I think you know that. And I hope that invites discomfort and growth.
I and my female friends who are pastors, and all women pastors, are unequivocally, irrevocably called.
Thanks be to God.
Amen! Thank you for sharing your voice, Pastor Sara <3
Why is it that if a woman preaches a sermon word for word that a man preaches, she is condemned while the man is praised for being true to his “calling”?