TESTIMONY OF BARBARA W. SESSIONS 

in Response to the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message

My name is Barbara Winn Sessions. I rise to speak today on my own authority as a follower of Christ. I shall present my testimony and then ask you to take action on a matter of urgency in the Southern Baptist Convention.

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The past 10 years has been a time of spiritual growth for me and my family. Most significantly, our son Scott, now age 15, has chosen to become a Christian. We are glad to be able to encourage him to find the Christ in everyone, to think through and do the Christ-like thing wherever he is able. Besides Scott, the most important person in my life is my husband, Don, who has been four-square behind me for 32 years and, I know, considers me his peer in marriage.

Like many of you, I accepted Christ as a child, through Vacation Bible School at the First Baptist Church of Tishomingo. One day our pastor, Rev. Johnny Stuckey, explained the plan of salvation, then asked if there were any takers. I believe I could walk into that church 45 years later and point to the place where I was sitting. That day, he seemed to be speaking directly to me.

That day, I was ready, even though I had already heard many sermons and participated in many Sunday School classes. Our mother was the lay song leader at the church. Her role meant we were always there, on the front row. To this day, I love congregational singing and gospel hymns, and these are the joyous part of church for me.

Later, it was our privilege to become members of a vibrant and growing congregation at the First Baptist Church of Midwest City, where the young people alone numbered in the hundreds. The church is located across the street from the football stadium and it was the place for youth to gather after the game.

By profession, I am a journalist, and my first real writing experience came as editor of our church’s youth newspaper. We called it The Minor Prophet. Each Saturday morning, beginning in junior high, I was up at 8 a.m. and at the church, waiting for the door to be unlocked by our Youth Director, first Jim Howell, and then Dick Rader. I would hunt and peck my way through a stencil that would tell about the many youth activities and shine the spotlight on individual youth, whom I would interview by telephone. No later than noon, I had to be finished so the Youth Director could return to church and print the paper for distribution the next morning.

Later, in high school, it was my privilege to cross town by myself and become a charter member of the church’s mission, now known as Meadowood Baptist Church. It has since become the largest church in Midwest City. Over the years in these large churches, I heard much quality preaching and many fine evangelists, including the young Daniel Vestal.

So, the rhythms and message of the church were engrained in me. As a child, I found there love, kindness, encouragement, and acceptance. Over the years, I have come to understand that people of other faiths find great strength and comfort in their religious experiences. All religious people share the requirement that we have faith, faith in miracles, faith in events that will not be duplicated. In the absence of objective truth -- what really did happen and how it will all turn out -- we must all be tolerant of one another.

I feel a kinship, a spiritual connectedness among human beings. I believe in the idea of progress, the basic goodness of people, and our human ability to accomplish great things and get along together. We live, I believe, in the greatest time ever to be alive. We are better prepared as individuals to create value, solve problems, and help one another than we have ever been before.

I value above all Jesus’ commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. It is the only standard He gave us by which to measure all human relationships. This standard does not stop at Timothy or Ephesians. For me, it is the absolute. In fact, those positive experiences in human relations that have occurred in my lifetime I find to be the outcome of good people, religious and secular, applying the Golden Rule, accepting one another as equals, simply wanting for others what we want for ourselves.

Don and I were born in 1946. That places us on the leading edge of what is called the “baby boom” generation that was born in the years immediately following World War II. Our times have experienced profoundly good outcomes from the practice of the Golden Rule.

When our family moved from Tishomingo to Midwest City, I was nine years old. Our family purchased a television set. My first memory of TV as we clicked on the set in 1955 was seeing black people -- Negroes -- sitting in at the Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City, quietly requesting to be served at the lunch counter.

This was the civil rights movement, the drive by the descendants of slaves and black immigrants to have the full freedoms and liberty of citizenship almost 100 years after the adoption of the 14th amendment. This was the time when the law of the land was “separate but equal.” And so students like Ada Lois Sipuel, the first black person to be admitted to the University of Oklahoma law school, sat in an isolated desk that was surrounded by wooden railings. In the absence of a black law school in our state, her setting in the white school would still be “separate but equal.”

I asked my mother, “What’s wrong with Negro people being served at the drug store?” My mother answered, “Nothing. It’s just that it hasn’t been done before.”

And so I followed the civil rights movement. I read and watched. My attention was drawn to brave Rosa Parks, who refused to move to the back of a bus, was arrested and drew freedom marchers, including Dr. Martin Luther King, to Alabama in her behalf. I admired Clara Looper, who organized young people in civil rights marches in Oklahoma City.

And I watched the barriers fall, beginning with the landmark 1954 legal case, Brown vs. Board of Education, that declared “separate but equal” to be “inherently unequal” and gave black citizens the full right of access to previously whites-only facilities.

Civil rights heroes suffered for their leadership. I was a junior in high school when Dr. King made his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. I was a senior in college when he was assassinated.

As a college student at the University of Oklahoma, I listened as some of the first black students admitted to the University raised their fists for “black power” -- the students’ angry and proud expression of self-esteem. I watched as they joined athletic teams and campus clubs that once had been closed to them.

Civil rights seemed to me a victory for the Golden Rule. Surely those who loved their neighbor as themselves would make certain that their neighbor had all the options possible and would not take away another person’s options to do and be the best they could.

As black people made their points and won great victories, the frontier of civil rights moved forward. Now it would be women who benefited.

Don and I moved to New York in 1975, and a year or two later a colleague of his became the first female partner in a major public accounting firm. What a day, and less than 25 years ago! Before her promotion, women in all types of jobs and professions were routinely dismissed upon marriage or pregnancy. They were rarely admitted to law school, medical school and other professions, and their growth and advancement were severely limited. They were (and are) paid less, despite their education and experience, in nearly every job. In closing our parents’ house a few years ago, I ran across my dad’s first contract with the Midwest City Schools. The box called “men’s premium” was checked, and next to it the amount of $100. My mother also was a teacher; she received no such premium.

Women learned from the civil rights movement to speak up for equal treatment. And so the barriers began to fall.

Today, women are entering the professions at an astonishing rate. When once only 2 or 3% of a medical school’s freshman class might be female, the percentage now is 50% or more. Sunday’s Ardmoreite carried news of eight new doctors in town, four of them female. Unprecedented! In overall college admissions, women currently hold a 10-point edge, comprising 55% of the nation’s student body, compared to 45% for men. Who would have believed?

And it is the best and brightest of women who are surging into the once-closed professions and achieving great things as doctors, lawyers, judges, and business people, and who are taking their places of service as police, firefighters, school principals, public officials, and, yes, as ministers. How many great ones have we missed out on already? How many great ones are poised to take the pulpit now?

Surely an evangelical organization wants to encourage all who are able to preach, to minister, and, yes, to lead and to pastor. If what has happened in other fields is any indication, the very best will rush to the pastorate and give us a tremendous boost. For example, though the female enrollment in the military academies is still very small -- about 5% of the corps, every academy has now had the experience of having a female cadet or midshipman become #1 in her class. At the Naval Academy last year, four of the top 10 graduates were female. We have some tremendous Baptist women who would excel as deacons and pastors right away and Christian women who would join us from other denominations.

Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, OU’s first black law student, eventually became a member of the Board of Regents that governs the university, and her story is told on a plaque in a quiet park on campus that has been dedicated to her. When we use the Golden Rule, isn’t this how things should turn out?

It’s a much healthier position to be for someone rather than against them. One of my favorite elections took place in 1918, when Oklahoma approved women’s suffrage, the right to vote. I like the outcome of that election and the fact that only men voted in it. Prior to the election, Oklahoma’s Secretary of Labor, a woman, campaigned against women having the right to vote. “I just don’t think they should have that responsibility,” she said.

Well, sometimes it’s hard for men and women to accept what hasn’t been done before. Yet no one today advocates a return to slavery or to separate but equal, or to a time when women couldn’t vote or own property or testify in court. We’re ashamed of those stands now that they’re gone, even though they were commonplace for many, many years.

So I can say to the Promise Keepers organization that advocates that men seize power in the home or to the myriad women’s study groups that actually hold seminars on such topics as, “How to be submissive when your husband is a weak leader,” please let the Golden Rule have its way. Just be Christlike, giving, loving, and fair. Aim for mutuality in marriage, and equality in life.

As Southern Baptists, we’ve reached a momentous time. The Convention has gotten us buckled in, fixed its eyes firmly in the rear view mirror, and thrown the bus into reverse gear. We’re headed backward to a rear-view mirror world unless individual Baptists like you and me speak up.

I am praying that each of us will have the courage to make change where we are.

WHY THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION IS WRONG

AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

By Barbara W. Sessions

During the past two annual meetings, the Southern Baptist Convention has gone out of its way to declare women subservient to men in the home and the church.

The 1998 assertion, that women should “graciously submit” to their husbands, poses a real and present threat, as violence in the home is the leading cause of death and injury to women. The Convention has made an extraordinarily insensitive declaration, placing the burden of submission entirely on women and framing what is essentially an unregulated benefit for men. Women always would be answerable to their husbands; husbands only to God. No true partnership can emerge when one person is permitted to dominate another. Such a notion is so dehumanizing to women and so debilitating to the institution of marriage as to be unthinkable. Yet this declaration is now part of the Baptist Faith and Message Statement and all who call themselves Southern Baptists will be assumed to subscribe to it.

The 1999 assertion, that women should not pastor Southern Baptist churches, also devalues women and their potential as leaders, ministers, and persons called by God. It is particularly insulting considering that women comprise most of the membership in nearly every church. Yet this declaration is now part of the Baptist Faith and Message Statement and all who call themselves Southern Baptists will be assumed to subscribe to it.

It is the responsibility of every Southern Baptist to be aware of these declarations limiting women in marriage and discouraging our churches from using the very best people available to teach, preach, and evangelize. We have the further duty as followers of Christ to reject these harmful ideas and report our rejection to our churches, associations, and the Convention itself.

Be aware that these harsh attacks on women emerged without provocation. In fact, they are all the more astonishing when we consider that in 1996, the Convention sought to improve its record on human rights by apologizing for 150 years of racism by the Convention. The apology represented a significant about-face for an organization that dates its name to the sectional division of the Civil War. In order to apologize, the Convention had to de-emphasize verses in the Bible that advise slaves to be submissive.

For the Convention to say it was wrong on race is reason enough to admit it has also been wrong on gender, thereby opening all aspects of the church to full participation by women and people of color. As much as women in the church might cling to the status quo and protest that they’re meant to be subservient, not one would turn down an apology from the Convention or a new declaration that they are welcome to be leaders in any area that God calls or members elect.

Nothing would do more to slow the incidence of domestic violence and child abuse in our country than for our two largest religious groups, the Southern Baptist Convention and the Roman Catholic Church, to stop blocking women from answering God’s call to be pastors or priests. Until this happens, women will continue to be perceived as of lesser value. This appearance allows women to be marginalized and abused.

Violence against girls and women is pervasive. The Justice Department estimates that 25-33% of girls and women are sexually abused or raped by the age of 24. Physical abuse by male partners is the single most common source of injury among women, more common than car accidents, muggings, or rapes combined.

Some 2.8 million women are abused annually by their partners, and witnessing violence in the family is the most important variable associated with a child becoming a future aggressor or future victim. Over half of all teen pregnancies are caused by men in their 20’s. “Date rape” accounts for over half of all rapes of adolescents.

Domestic violence experts report that those who perpetrate sex crimes and batter women invariably hold rigid views of gender roles and feel justified in being jealous, possessive, and controlling. A former police chief who now counsels convicted wife abusers in north Texas says, “One hundred percent of the men I counsel believe religion is on their side.” The director of a domestic violence shelter in southern Oklahoma adds, “For women of strong faith who come here to the Shelter, it’s quite common for them to think the Bible requires them to submit to anything their husband does to them. Now abusers will be able to say, ‘the Southern Baptist Convention says that’s the way you should think,’ It’s real frustrating.” Most often, where domestic violence exists, child abuse also is occurring.

Over the past 40 years or so, obstacles to individual determination have dwindled because public and government institutions that blocked the advancement of minorities and women have made change. Sadly, the only institutions that appear to be lobbying against women right now are religious ones -- largely fundamentalist -- here and abroad. The very groups that ought to be leading the way in attending to women’s suffering are instead adding to it. It is now up to individual Southern Baptists to find women worthy of full personhood in moral and spiritual matters and to insist that the Convention do the same.

Here’s what you can do:

1.    If you are a member of an organization that practices prejudice and bias toward women, advocate for change. Do it now.

2.    If you are asked to serve on a Board or committee whose bylaws preclude election of women, decline to serve. Tell why.

3.    Speak up for women, children, and all who suffer from domestic violence and child abuse. Contribute to your local Domestic Violence Shelter. Volunteer as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for children.

4.    Don’t make or condone statements or actions that belittle women or       minorities. Such form the basis for discrimination and abuse.

Perform individual acts of conscience like these at every opportunity. Have the courage of your convictions. Join with like-minded individuals.

Barbara W. Sessions 35 Fairway Dr., Burneyville, OK 73430; (580) 276-2333

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