Growing up in the Southern Baptist tradition, I encountered few female clergy or church leaders. Instead, I was constantly inundated with theological arguments for why women could not hold leadership over men – especially when it came to teaching Scripture or developing young male leaders.

All that changed in 1993 when I attended, of all places, Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary, the largest Southern Baptist seminary in the world at the time. 

It began with the convocation address of Dr. Boo Heflin, an Old Testament professor at the seminary. Dr. Heflin started his remarks by presenting all the familiar scriptural arguments for downgrading female leadership in the church. But then, remarkably, he began to cite passage after passage as to why those arguments were inconsistent with the universal truth of the Bible.

Needless to say, this little fundamentalist misogynist was devastated, but intrigued. If my former pastors and leaders misled me on this issue, what else did they get wrong?

Read more at: https://goodfaithmedia.org/female-influences-on-my-life-dr-karen-bullock/