This is What A Preacher Looks Like

Worship/Preaching

Durso, ed.

“This beautiful collection sings with the energy of the spirit. An important tribute to the power women bring to the word. Amen, sisters!”

—Susan Sparks Pastor, Madison Avenue Baptist Church, New York

“A powerful reminder that God does what the Bible says God does; pour out the Spirit of proclamation on sons and daughters with no regard for whether they happen to be sons or daughters.”

—Chuck Poole Pastor, Northminster Baptist Church, Jackson, Mississippi

Mary Yangsook Ahn Robin Bolen Anderson Patricia A. Bancroft Faithe Beam Bonnie Oliver Brandon Katrina Stipe Brooks Amy Butler Eileen Campbell-Reed Dorisanne Cooper Lynn Dandridge Isabel N. Docampo Elizabeth Rickert Dowdy

Pamela R. Durso Kristy Eggert F. Sue Fitzgerald Tammy Jackson Gill Elizabeth Evans Hagan Amber C. Inscore Essick LeAnn Gunter Johns Andrea Dellinger Jones Martha Dixon Kearse Julie Merritt Lee Jewel M. London Nora O. Lozano

Molly T. Marshall Amy Mears Robin Norsworthy Suzii Paynter Julie Pennington-Russell Suzanah Raffield Nancy Hastings Sehested Sarah Jackson Shelton Amy Shorner-Johnson Sarah Stewart Lisa L. Thompson Joy Yee

Pamela R. Durso is executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry in Atlanta, Georgia, and is an adjunct professor at McAfee School of Theology.

This Is What a Preacher Looks Like

Contributors

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Our Good Shepherd Psalm 23

Julie PenningtonRussell.

A friend of mine in California received a phone call early one morning, the kind every parent dreads. Her daughter, who was in her mid-thirties and a successful executive living in Tennessee, had been battling anorexia for several years. She had been hospitalized and was close to death. My friend immediately flew to Nashville and stayed with her daughter around the clock while she fought for her life. Happily, the young woman recovered. She now has moved back to San Francisco to be near her family and is doing pretty well, actually. But during those dark weeks in that Nashville hospital, we thought she might not survive.

One morning, during the worst part of the ordeal, the girl’s mother was close to despair. Having sat awake the night before by her daughter’s bedside, my friend was exhausted and terrified. She decided to take a walk to clear her head. She meandered through the hospital corridor and ended up in a little chapel not far from the cafeteria, a quiet space that opened into a lovely garden. At that time my friend did not consider herself at all religious, and in fact, she referred to herself as a “functioning agnostic.” But her boat was going down in that dark sea, and she was grabbing for whatever lifeline she could find.

The little chapel was an interfaith one. On a large table lit with candles, among a scattering of sacred books, was a large, ornate King James Bible. My friend was biblically illiterate, did not know Genesis from Jell-o, but she recalled a text from somewhere in her past. So she traced a finger down the table of contents, not remembering if the Psalms were in the Old Testament or the New. Finding the text for which she was looking, she read that psalm and read it again and again. Read it silently. Read it aloud. Wept over it. And later my

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friend told me, “The words of the Twenty-third Psalm performed CPR on my broken heart that day. It felt to me as if they were pounding on my chest, blowing oxygen into my lungs. It was the first time in my life that I actually perceived God holding me, and I thought, ‘This is what it feels like to be cared for by God.’” I have no doubt that it was the spirit of God hovering over my friend that day. But I have also found myself wondering—what, specifically, in the Twenty-third Psalm spoke to her in that desperate hour? It may have been that these words come from someone who appears to have walked through fire and made it to the other side. Perhaps my friend was able to trace her own silhouette in the lines of the psalm. Psalm 23 expresses such a simple, almost childlike, faith. But it is faith on the far side of some real pain, which makes it a faith worth paying attention to.

Or maybe my friend was overtaken by the image of God presented in the psalm: God as my shepherd. Of course, if God is a shepherd, guess what that makes us? Baa. This shepherd makes us lie down in green pastures. Some of us really do need someone to make us lie down and rest. This good shepherd cares for us in our exhaustion. And he leads us beside still waters. Some of us lead such fragmented lives; we need to be guided into a way of being that is not so splintered, but is integrated and whole. Sometimes I feel like the woman in Margaret Atwood’s poem: Most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want.

My heart is more duplicitous . . .

It says, I want, I don’t want, I want . . .

How can one live with such a heart?1

When our family lived in San Francisco, sometimes we would go down to Fisherman’s Wharf to watch the street artists perform all sorts of outlandish acts. I remember one juggler who could keep five or six bowling pins up in the air at once while riding a unicycle across a tightrope. That street juggler reminds me of me sometimes—trying to remain balanced while keeping all of my priorities airborne. Toss this pin up for God, this one for family, this one for church, this one for my friends. No wonder I feel dizzy and split apart so much of the time!

This psalm comes along and immediately wants to knock down our pins. You and I will never sit beside still waters until we come to understand that God refuses to be one of our priorities—not even the first priority. God

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is the entire ground beneath our feet and the gathering sky under which our priorities have any hope of making sense at all. Until we get clear about that, we are still stuck in “I want, I don’t want. . . . I want, I don’t want.” The good shepherd cares for us in our agitation.

When we have rested in green pastures and drunk from still waters and it is time to hit the road again, our shepherd leads us down a good one. Even when we do not realize what the shepherd is up to, there he is—preparing the ground, scouting ahead, and scanning for wolves and thickets and scary ravines. I can give a word of witness about that. Today is my father’s birthday. Dad died nine years ago of cancer, but today he would have been seventy-four years old. Because I have been thinking about my father and this psalm all week, I have found myself mulling over a warm memory from my childhood. Part of my story has to do with a particular piece of God’s providence at work in my life, even before I was born.

I come from a family of coal miners. Both my mother’s father and my father’s father mined coal in Alabama for Republic Iron & Steel. One terrible day in August 1943, both of my grandfathers were burned to death when a series of explosions ripped through the Sayreton mines near Birmingham. In all, thirty mine workers died, including William Pennington and Staples Bailey, my grandfathers. My mother was four years old at that time, and my father was eight.

Dad’s family was desperately poor, poorer than my mother’s family, largely because there were so many of them to feed. My father was one of eleven Pennington children, and the only one who finished high school.

Some years later, in 1956, four years before I was born, my father realized that he was not going to be able to go to college because he needed to work to help support the family. Dad was faced with a decision: work in the same mine where his father had died or go downtown to the Air Force recruiter’s office and sign up. Dad’s decision to enlist pretty much changed my life, although I was not even yet born. His decision took our family out of Alabama. I do not have a thing in the world against Alabama; it was a great growing-up place for my parents. But Birmingham in the 1960s was, as you know, a broken city. And so while my cousins were growing up in that place with the fire hoses, bombings, and segregation, my brother and I were out in California, living in base housing next door to the Schwartzes, who were Jewish, and the Washingtons, who were African American. We shared a courtyard with the Awohis, who were native Hawaiians. Their children were my playmates, and I loved them.

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That experience shaped my life in powerful ways. Besides the broadened racial perspective, I also perceived a delicious freedom in California from a lot of the gender stereotypes that I had observed in the South. In those days, Helen Reddy was singing, “I am woman, hear me roar,” and in my young heart a seed was planted. The years we spent in the San Joaquin Valley of California when I was in junior high and high school were some of the most formative of my life. Memories of that time later drew me back to the West Coast when I decided to go to seminary. Somehow God took that colossal disappointment for my father, the closed door to college, and used some of the broken pieces of his dream to make a path for me that to this day feels beautiful beneath my feet. “He leads me in right paths.”

Sometimes, however, a season comes when the path does not feel right at all. You receive a call from the doctor: “Your tests have come back, and there is some cause for concern.” The jungle drums start beating in the back of your head. Or your spouse says the words you never imagined you would hear: “I am not sure that I love you anymore.” Or your children fall into some terrible hole. You cannot reach them, cannot rescue them, and the ceiling presses in. Life has never seemed darker.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow.” Where is the green pasture now? Where is the still water? And, for that matter, where the heck is the shepherd? Such a place is where David, our psalmist, finds himself, and what does he do? He does what a child would do. He reaches a hand into the darkness, desperate to find a hand reaching back, and what do you know, the hand of the good shepherd is there. “I will fear no evil . . . you are with me.” And it’s enough.

For hapless and harried sheep that are lost and afraid, the shepherd’s nearness gives us courage enough to keep walking. And if we do—if we trust the one who is walking just ahead, beating back the thorns with his staff—in time, we will find ourselves emerging into the light. Not the same old light, mind you, but a brand new light. When David finally steps out of the shadow, he gets a brand new way of looking at God and a new way of seeing himself as well. At the beginning of this psalm, the writer sees himself as a sheep with the shepherd. But now, on the far side of despair, what does he see? A table. A cup. Sweet oil for his head. Suddenly this barnyard sheep has been promoted to honored guest at the Lord’s own table, and God the shepherd has become the welcoming host.

So can you say it yet? “My cup runneth over.” Some of you can. Some of you have a cup like a Florentine fountain these days. You need a manager

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just to keep track of all the goodness. Some of you cannot say it now because you are walking through a season of shadows. But keep walking. Keep leaning in with faith. Keep praying, “You are with me. You are with me.”

Listen to God’s own promise: There is a cup with your name on it on the far side of this valley, a cup deep and full of joy for you. There is a table of welcome for you. There is a home in God’s own house for you. The cup, the table, and the home are ahead of you as you trust the shepherd in the shadow as well as in the meadow.

What does this kind of trust look like? It is probably different for every life, but here is what it looks like for me: Once I was in such a particularly dark valley that I needed to go away for a time in order to find my footing again. I went to what had become a place of renewal for me, a Catholic retreat center about forty miles from Waco, Texas. Before leaving on retreat, I got an e-mail from a good friend and mentor, a woman who is a spiritual director for many. She wrote, Julie, so glad that you are going on retreat. I hope that the time with Jesus in nature will break down big chunks of the devil’s scare tactics so that you can see that really, you are riding on Jesus’ shoulders, and he is knocking the problems out of the park for you because he is big and you are small.

Remember, he loves for you to be part of what he’s doing, but he never would leave the load of these problems on your slender shoulders. Take in love and deep rest, dear friend.

Maybe your soul is completely restored these days, and if so, that is wonderful. Celebrate it. But if your life feels frantic and frayed and seriously unmanageable, know that there is a shepherd who loves you and wants nothing more than to swing you up on his shoulders and carry you to a safe place of rest and peace.

All thanks and praise to our good shepherd, who has the power to lead us—even through the dark valley of death—because he has been there, and he knows his way out. And since that day, there has not been a grave that could keep holding any of God’s children. Talk about good news.

Note 1. Margaret Atwood, “The Woman Who Could Not Live with Her Faulty Heart,” TwoHeaded Poems (Oxford University Press, 1978) 14.

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The Seed in Your Heart Matthew 13:24-29

Amy ShornerJohnson

I once had a friend sitting by me in class who said, “Parables are ordinary stories, turned upside down to improve the hearer’s eyesight.” In the case of kingdom parables, I think he might be right. The Gospel writer Matthew seems particularly interested in the ones that have mysterious sightings of the divine. Jesus tells a good number of them, and to do so, he spends a lot of time observing gardeners, farmers, seeds, plants, food, and the people who spend their time around such things. They are the star characters in a number of Jesus’ teachings: the farmer with an amazingly wide range of soils in his own backyard, a man who trades all he has for the miracles found in one field, a mustard seed with faith to become a huge tree, and a little yeast that turns ordinary dough into delicious golden bread.

Each of the parables I mentioned is in Matthew 13, and a few of them even have explanations for those who have ears to hear. Matthew was an insider in the life of Jesus, a former tax collector turned disciple when he heard Jesus calling. So when we read a parable in this Gospel and hear its secret explanation, we can remember that Matthew was one of the insiders— who is not too far removed to remember having been an outsider, having seen the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of life.

Matthew is the only Gospel writer who writes with such fury about the end of the world, with clear signs as to the different outcomes for those who are evil and those who are good, and Matthew 13 is not the only place in which those conversations show up. His Gospel also contains the parables of the sheep and goats and the wise and foolish maidens, and both those stories

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end with lots of weeping and gnashing of teeth. According to Matthew, Jesus has made it clear that there are two ways for a human to live, and after hearing his stories most people knew on which side they wanted to end up.

In this particular chapter, Matthew 13, the writer focuses on the topic of the kingdom of God and the way it tends to grow around us in our world. It may seem like a strange place for such a fiery parable, but here it is, growing along with the others that surround it, in surprising and mischievous ways.

We pick up in the middle of the chapter (Matt 13:24) with what seems to be an everyday wheat farmer who encounters a common problem. Weeds!

While I know there are some excellent gardeners who can even identify plants by their Latin names, most of us could probably name the basic things it take to grow a plant: a seed, good soil, sunlight, and water. Weeds are not in that mix. As the parable of the four soils taught us, weeds tend to choke out the things we intend to grow and leave no room for the good seeds to grow. Weeds steal water, take up good soil, and sometimes shade perfectly good plants from sunlight. If you are still having trouble coming up with an image, think kudzu!

But not all weeds are as easy to identify. In looking up the distinction between a weed and a plant, I found a few quotes during an ordinary computer search that preach for themselves: • “A weed is a plant someone wishes were not in that spot.”

• “The difference between a flower and a weed is love and hate.”

• “A weed is the undesirable, the unwanted.”

• And then one surrounded by lots of exclamations points—“My lawn may be full of weeds to some, but to me it is full of lovely flowers! Dandelions are flowers!”

• “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson Sometimes telling the difference between a weed and a plant is not all that easy. Perhaps you have had the same experience as I have—mistaking the two in someone else’s yard. Once while I was in high school, I was working in the back of someone else’s yard in the name of missions and loving my neighbor. I was pulling up a lot of tangled vines and prickly patches, which I confess all looked the same to me. If it had thorns and was not a rose, I assumed it was supposed to be gone; after all, it was damaging the environment, mainly me! Most of the greenery in that yard was overgrown, making

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it difficult to see anything that looked “beautiful” in my book. But about halfway through, I found that I was a bit too good at my job, having pulled up the owner’s favorite plant. Sometimes, in our haste, sometimes even in our desire for good and perhaps even growth, we move a little too quickly and end up pulling out the good with the bad.

That lesson is a major point in this parable. The weed that this farmer had encountered was a tare, possibly also known as “darnel.” Darnel is actually related to wheat. It resembles wheat, and it lives vibrantly among wheat stalks. But darnel is not only a choking hazard; it is also dangerous for those who confuse it with wheat, for it sometimes causing blindness, even death, if enough of it mixes in with the real stuff.

According to our parable, the wheat in this particular field had already grown tall before the servants realized that something was not quite right.

The weeds came up as a surprise and a shock, as weeds do for most of us.

The farmer did not set out to grow weeds in his field, but real life tells us that bad things can grow in our fields even when we work hard to sow seeds of good. Sometimes that is just how life goes, and we have to deal with whatever is growing in our backyard.

Having already sweated over this field, the servants go back to the owner, figuring that no matter who is the culprit, they have their work cut out for them. They come in for a meeting with the owner to get the truth of the situation straightened out. Knowing that it was not the intention of the farmer to put weeds into the ground, especially dangerous ones, the servants come with their hoes and their Round Up ready and in hand, prepared to do whatever it takes to be able to harvest some wheat in the coming days.

But in a twist of the unusual, the servants encounter another surprise, one that to them seems to be the opposite of what the owner of the field would want. The owner tells his servants to leave the wheat and the tares side by side until the harvest. Side by side, growing together. This response may sound a little eccentric to some. Understanding this farmer’s goals is hard, but he does not seem fixated on perfection, beauty, or efficiency. He certainly does not seem to be worried about making a profit! Allowing a weed to grow alongside a staple crop seems risky, but apparently taking that risk is the only way the farmer thinks he will get a satisfactory result.

What do we do with this crazy farmer? And even more so, what do we do when this parable is supposed to be about the kingdom of God, exploding here on earth? I do not know about you, but all the other parables about the kingdom in Matthew 13 seem to be a little more comforting than this

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one. The other parables seem to be about good things—bread rising, trees growing, and hidden treasures that are worth all other possessions combined.

Most people do not get that excited about sharing the good news about a field prone to weeds. If this is God’s kingdom showing up, well, it looks a little more like reality than I would like it to.

Perhaps this parable is a glimpse of the reality of the kingdom at its very core, and Jesus is telling us the way it really is. The kingdom is hidden away in the weeds, only visible to those willing to spend some time looking for it.

Most people would not look around and say they see God’s kingdom breaking out, at least, not most of the people one sees every day on the street. The common everyday person I meet is busy being worried about where the world is headed and recites stories about things falling apart and always getting worse. We have enough evil things that hide the stories of good in our world: crime, war, hatred, poverty, death, homes that are broken into, homes that are broken apart, and people who are out to get us.

Some people spend their entire lives trying to avoid such things, purposefully seeking out only places surrounded by good. And such avoidance is common even for people who are disciples. We prefer to separate out the clean and the unclean, the good and the bad, so that when Jesus comes back to make some decisions, we will not be easily confused in the mix. There will be a clear line between the weed row and the wheat row.

The thing is, real life is never that easy, and sometimes the weeds creep up in unexpected places. Inside and outside the church, we find that things are not as perfect as we thought they would be, even as they were supposed to be. Although we have avoided the wrong crowds, never driven in the bad parts of town, and moved away from the perils of dangerous places, evil still seems to slither into our midst. We cannot completely escape it. Sometimes, evil even finds its way into our own hearts, and all our running away does nothing to stop it from growing.

The truth, however, is that even when we ask for evil to be removed, the sower of the seed seems to have left us to live with it, at least for a while. For now, we have to deal with the fact that we are living with weeds, and the sower is not about to let us escape from those weeds or destroy them for fear that their destruction might do some damage, more damage than the weeds themselves. But much like real life, when danger lurks in front of us, the easiest way out is the one we usually take. But our great God knows something that we do not easily remember: sometimes we run so far to escape all things evil that we completely forget that removing the evil from the equation will

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also uproot the sustenance for the good. Jesus and the farmer in his story seem to have more faith in the wheat than we often do. I saw a quote last week from a teacher at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. He wrote, “Jesus sowed his seed in our hearts, then off he went. . . . He knew things would not be ideal. There were the birds and the droughts, the weeds and the insects, the parasites and the blights. But there was also the power of the seed itself.”1 Sometimes it is not so easy to trust the power of God in us, the power of God that works through us, and to let the kingdom of God live in us even in the midst of what seem like defeating circumstances. We prefer to act like the harvesters, or the one who owns the field, and control our own field and destroy any evil that gets in the way of a good harvest, but sometimes following our preference means doing more damage than good. We too easily forget that we are the wheat in this parable, and not the servants, not the farmer. We are the seeds full of power to grow, power to feed and provide, and power to nourish.

I am increasingly convinced that this is why Jesus explains the parable to the disciples. You may not agree, but my observation has been that when we see something wrong or even risky, we either want to stop it dead in its tracks or forget it, or even bury it deep. But we never want to work with it. We often find ourselves anxious to do something about the problem, and we do not take time to look at the whole picture. In our haste, instead of getting to the root of the problem, we take out the whole garden, weed and wheat alike. That is much easier than having to sort through the weeds and the wheat and figure out which is which. I know I am guilty of this. Running to a safer place is easier. Protecting ourselves with fences, scarecrows, and barbed wire so that nothing will get to us is easier. I feel safer when I am not just one of the mix. Singling out a scapegoat and resolving a problem by making it someone else’s fault is easier for me. Burying my own faults deep inside me and moving on is not as hard. If the kingdom did not have so many weeds, I would be happier. Instead, I hide the weeds or try to rid myself of them, but they keep growing back.

Perhaps we can find comfort in the fact that the perfect kingdom that God is calling us to live in is the one we actually live in. God is calling us to live in a world that is surrounded by bad things, scary things, and evil things, and the kingdom of God is among even those things we would rather avoid.

But in the midst of the weeds, we find good, and that good is worth working with, worth living in, and even worth investing ourselves in. We know

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because we have found some good in ourselves, legitimate good despite the dark secrets we keep to ourselves. We can find comfort in that we are not the ones in charge of having to decide even which is which, which is the wheat and which is the weed. Because I wonder, if it were up to us, would anyone still be standing?

Our purpose is to remember which part of the story we are. We are the crop, most likely, wheat and weed alike. We are seeds with the power to grow, to nourish, to fall, and to cause more seeds to grow where we have left off. Not only that, but we are the seeds with power to grow even in what seems to be the worst of all situations. Jesus had a lot of faith in the power of a seed, and he invites us to have the courage to grow in the midst of adversity even when it seems we are surrounded by things intent on destroying us.

Jesus believes we have a chance even when we feel like giving up and throwing it all away. And in Jesus we find hope and our calling, a calling that needs to be more than just something we talk about. Our God believes that this field is worth working with, and God will not stop until wheat and weed alike are fat with potential. Our job is to seek out the good, to lift it up, and to live it out as best we can until our God comes for the harvest.

A Christian reformer from India named Pandita Ramabai wrote, “People must not only hear about the kingdom of God, but must see it in actual operation, on a small scale perhaps and in imperfect form, but a real demonstration nevertheless.”2 So I ask you, what might it mean for us to believe that the power of the kingdom is here, and to take hold of that, to believe it even when it seems that it is imperfect? What would it take for you to believe that there is still some good left in the wheat field and to believe that all the work is not in vain? What would it mean for us to live as though there are pieces of the kingdom of God so worth saving that we start working right here with what we have so that all can share in the bounty of the crop? What would make it sound like good news to you, so maybe, just maybe, you would be excited to tell about it?

Maybe it sounds too optimistic for your ears, but if we say we believe in the power of God, if we believe the message that the kingdom of God is among us, then perhaps we can also believe that God’s power to work all things together for the good of those who love him is true too, weeds and all.

The kingdom of God is here, even among the weeds. It is time to believe the good news that it is breaking out among us, and there is nothing we can do to stop it! But we can help other see it! Open your eyes and believe!

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Notes 1. “Voice of the Day: Joseph G. Donders,” God’s Politics: A Blog by Jim Wallis and Friends, 15 July 2008, http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2008/07/voice-of-the-dayjoseph-g-dond.html (accessed 16 November 2009).

2. “Voice of the Day: Pandita Ramabai,” God’s Politics blog, 16 July 2008, http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2008/07/voice-of-the-day-pandita-ramab.html (accessed 16 November 2009).

Worship/Preaching

Durso, ed.

“This beautiful collection sings with the energy of the spirit. An important tribute to the power women bring to the word. Amen, sisters!”

—Susan Sparks Pastor, Madison Avenue Baptist Church, New York

“A powerful reminder that God does what the Bible says God does; pour out the Spirit of proclamation on sons and daughters with no regard for whether they happen to be sons or daughters.”

—Chuck Poole Pastor, Northminster Baptist Church, Jackson, Mississippi

Mary Yangsook Ahn Robin Bolen Anderson Patricia A. Bancroft Faithe Beam Bonnie Oliver Brandon Katrina Stipe Brooks Amy Butler Eileen Campbell-Reed Dorisanne Cooper Lynn Dandridge Isabel N. Docampo Elizabeth Rickert Dowdy

Pamela R. Durso Kristy Eggert F. Sue Fitzgerald Tammy Jackson Gill Elizabeth Evans Hagan Amber C. Inscore Essick LeAnn Gunter Johns Andrea Dellinger Jones Martha Dixon Kearse Julie Merritt Lee Jewel M. London Nora O. Lozano

Molly T. Marshall Amy Mears Robin Norsworthy Suzii Paynter Julie Pennington-Russell Suzanah Raffield Nancy Hastings Sehested Sarah Jackson Shelton Amy Shorner-Johnson Sarah Stewart Lisa L. Thompson Joy Yee

Pamela R. Durso is executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry in Atlanta, Georgia, and is an adjunct professor at McAfee School of Theology.

This Is What a Preacher Looks Like

Contributors