Is This A Bud?
If you follow me on social media you know this month I announced a bit of a break.
Through the season of Eastertide I’ve decided to delete my social media apps and take an intentional break from creating the short-form content that often clouds up my professional brainspace.
On a personal level, the endless scrolling has been fueled by my Enneagram 9 narcotizing avoidance. What am I avoiding?
This article I’m writing now. Which I’ve tried to write a dozen or more times over the last 2 years.
Because buried deep in between the lines of the writing here is a deep internal wrestling that I’ve been working through for my entire life. And this Spring through a series of unrelated and unplanned events a lot has been unveiled to me about some of my deepest struggles and the common thread of call running through my life.
Let’s back up so you get the picture.
Baby me celebrating my dedication with a good cry. Behind us is the same alter I would walk up to 6 years later to “commit my life to Jesus.”
I’ve been a church girl forever. I was born into the Southern Baptist Church and I was all in for Jesus by the time I was 6 years old. Shortly after I turned 7, I waded into the baptistry waters at my small, red-carpeted church and stood on a cinderblock so the people in the pews below could see the top of my head.
I don’t remember a lot of my childhood, honestly, but I remember these moments. I remember the butterflies in my stomach and unevenness of the old carpet under my feet as I walked up the aisle with my mom to choose Jesus as my Savior. I remember playing with the gold pins in the brown leather couch as my pastor asked questions about my commitment to Jesus to see if I could truly understand as such a young child. I remember the look on his face when he knew I understood. I remember the white robe and looking across the baptistry at my mom in the shadows on the other side. And then I remember wanting to grab on to church life as hard as I could, wherever anyone would let me.
Tiny me matching the carpet and Christmas poinsettias. 90s ruffles on point.
The first thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a pastor’s wife. This ambition might sound crazy and not at all career oriented to you if you didn’t grow up in the Southern Baptist Church. But small Bonni knew what she knew. I felt a call to positively influence people’s faith in Jesus, and the only woman I saw with the amount of influence I was drawn toward was the pastor’s wife.
The story between then and now is filled with the whiplash experience many women who feel drawn or called toward church ministry experience in complementarian spaces. Some of my gifts were embraced and encouraged while others were shamed and silenced. Over time I got the message that was being sent to me between the lines—spiritual influence is not for women, it’s not for you. So the older I got, the less I allowed myself to be serious about anything other than being a great wife and mother.
Why yes I did arrange my birthday candles into a cross on purpose. This is not my only cross themed birthday cake in life.
I picked graphic design as my college degree because I thought it would allow me to make a little side money as I raised my kids. I never entertained anything beyond a bachelor’s degree. I backed off of Bible study. I didn’t write even though I was constantly scribbling my own thoughts and ideas into sermon notes and Bible margins.
As I entered adulthood after college, freshly married, my career angst started right away. I didn’t like graphic design for the sake of graphic design. I was withering away. And then I found a project.
The church my husband and I had started going to had awful branding. They clearly needed help, and suddenly, I had self-starter initiative again. Something I hadn’t felt in a while. I created an entire brand expansion and strategy and found myself cornering the lead pastor after service one Sunday with a booklet of ideas. He was intrigued and invited me to instead rebrand the entire church.
This is how I got my ministry job. And what started as me being ‘that designer on staff’ soon dusted off the deep-seated call that had been slowly buried in my lifetime.
I came alive not behind the computer screen, but in front of my volunteer team. My favorite part of my ministry job was thinking about what my volunteers needed to grow and then crafting an experience to support them. Every month I planned creative ice breakers, I cast vision, and I wrote them a custom devotional. Every month I saw my volunteers come more alive and attuned to their own calls. I was ALIVE.
VBS showcase, a Baptist classic. The cowboy hat didn’t match the outfit I painted myself, so no thanks cowboy hat.
This April I listened to a short podcast series called “All The Buried Women.” ATBW is a documentary style series exploring the Southern Baptist Convention’s recent and drastic shift to exclude women from ministry.
If you know me, you know I love a bit of church history. I have gotten in trouble more than once for asking “Where does this come from?” when I had the hunch that Jesus wasn’t the source. I loved Jesus and John Wayne and The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. I was ready for another peek behind the curtain of seedy Church roots. But I wasn’t ready for what this new podcast series was going to show me about myself.
Turns out I’m a buried woman too, but not in the ways outlined in this podcast series.
Yep! I also went to a private Southern Baptist School until 8th Grade.
ATBW used the extensive archives in the Southern Baptist Convention to uncover stories of hardship and even abuse toward women in the SBC. They were able to find unsung pastors allowed to keep serving only if quietly. They found loopholes. They found story after story of hidden abuses. But I’m not this kind of buried at all, no. You’ll never find me in the SBC archives. I’m a daughter of the 90s and by the time we came along, we knew we never belonged in the archives at all.
If you listen to the podcast you’ll hear the history of how churches only need a female pastor on staff to be disfellowshipped from the SBC. And how this hasn’t been the story for very long. If you’re older than 50 you probably know this to some degree. But if you’re my age listening to this historic retelling, it is glaring the evidence that the SBC has betrayed you for your entire life.
Before the 1980s, women were being ordained in the Southern Baptist Church and the movement to support women in ministry was growing. Until this movement met the Conservative Resurgence which also happened in the 80s. In 1984, the first resolution against women in ministry passed at the annual meeting, and this resolution took the wind out of the sails for much of the support of women in ministry in the SBC. I was born in 1989 believing that this is how it had always been.
I can’t recall a woman from my childhood with a PhD. I’m sure she existed but she was not celebrated. I never recall a woman praying from stage at my church. Only my Sunday School teachers in the privacy of our classroom. I never saw a woman teach or preach from any pulpit. I easily picked up on the subtle message that women’s ministry was watered down Bible study, and I avoided involvement. I also embodied the misogynistic idea that women are just harder to get along with so in my teenage years I didn’t foster many female friendships.
For my entire life I have lived the roller coaster reality of feeling a call toward ministry and scorning the women who tried to pursue ministerial calls themselves. I didn’t know any better. I was formed by rotten teaching presented as Scriptural truth.
I know you’re wondering about my youth group experiences too. I met my husband at youth group. Here is a picture of us at camp, I cut my sister out of it. We found a hidden place to make out later.
The consistent theme of my adult life has been vocational angst.
I have been happy with every other area of my life. The closest I’ve come to feeling vocationally aligned is when I was serving on the church staff I mentioned earlier where I was allowed to flex my pastoral tendencies. I was invited to speak almost weekly to introduce the time of giving. I was writing for the entire congregation on a regular basis. I was carefully walking with volunteers and shepherding interns who wanted to become healthy leaders.
In 2019, as I was barreling toward burnout, I wrote out a huge list of everything I did in my job (which was a lot, too much honestly), and then I circled the parts I loved.
My podcasting pal, John, and I go way back. Here we are teaching the people how to stay informed at church.
Every circle, every single circle, was pastoral in nature. I still have that list, in fact, I set it right in front of me as I remembered it. I even rewrote my circles into a new list called “Favorite things” and it is filled with items like writing devotionals, empowering young leaders, church-wide vision casting and follow-up, message contributions…
The last time I got brave enough to admit my call to ministry was 2019. And from that revelation this Enneagram 9 started doing the unheard of—she started taking steps toward what she wanted.
I started conversations with my leaders about my clarity of call. I expressed interest in helping to develop a spiritual formation plan for our church—a huge hole in our ministry at the time. I asked them to start looking for someone else to do the grunt work of marketing, design, and communications because I was burning out doing the tasks I was never actually called to do. (Don’t get me wrong, I needed design to get me to this point, but I had outgrown it.)
These early conversations were a mix of encouraging and infuriating. There was always something for me to improve. Or an urgent something or another to finish first. And then the pandemic hit.
If you were in church ministry during the pandemic (or a number of areas really), you know the pandemic was a free-fall and it only accentuated the strengths and weaknesses of every organization. I kind of hate how this looks typed out, but I’m going to say this from a place of grounding and truth… when the cracks started widening in our church as the pandemic bulldozed through, I did a lot of work to hold us together. My leadership was important. I helped us get steady. And I did it all while carrying the bulk of responsibility to communicate to our scattered congregation, while pregnant, and while caring for my 3 year-old 24/7. I had proven my chops to myself and to my leaders. So as my maternity leave loomed later in the year, I drew a line.
Me and a Bible verse behind me because ya girl preached half a sermon for the first time in 2019.
I said to them that I could no longer serve as the Communications Leader only. God was calling me toward more and I wanted to pursue that. I really wanted to pursue this call there. As I left to welcome my second child, I was assured that the background work would be done so I could return to a new role. They wanted to support my call, and they saw how it could benefit the church.
I left energized! And when I returned a few months later that energy quickly dissipated. Nothing happened while I was gone. My lead pastor was avoiding me. My executive pastor was totally deflated and just trying to buy time from me before the inevitable would happen. I stuck it out for another 8 months, baffled by what I was experiencing. I had done everything I was asked to do. I grew. I listened. I worked hard. I proved myself even. But I was stuck.
I didn’t realize that what I was up against was the stained-glass ceiling of the Southern Baptist Church until I sat in my lead pastor’s office at an exit interview I had requested. As I offered my heart-felt and sincere hopes for the church’s success, my pastor at the time replied “Bonni, you are an incredibly gifted-by-God person. You could be a pastor—not here of course, ha—but you could.”
In the moment, I was flattered! No one had ever acknowledged my gifts like that before! How lovely to be seen! But as I exited the room the other edge of that sword stabbed me right in the chest. “Not here of course.”
It wasn’t me. I wasn’t misinterpreting my call. The same place that had dusted off decades of bad theology piled it right back on again. I could be a pastor! If only I had the qualifying penis! I could have even been a pastor there! But, alas, God made a mistake when he made me a woman, so a pastor I could not be.
One of the few pictures I have of myself leading the offering prayer. Even though I did this almost weekly, the photographers felt like they needed to bow their heads instead of take pictures :)
I’m 36 years old and I don’t really know what I want to do when I grow up.
Some things feel too late, or maybe just not-right-now in life.
Listening to the history of the denomination that formed me and broke me at the same time has led me to a spring of both revelation and deep grief.
After leaving my church ministry job, I’ve found myself back where I was before 2013 when I started there. Small, worried, confused, and buried.
Understanding the years of bad teaching and ill will that has shaped my life has been an invitation to freedom and a terrifying place of discovery.
I don’t really know what it means for a person when she’s never been allowed to dream in line with God’s dreams. I don’t know what it means for a person when she’s given permission to see the whole picture after her life is well-established. When any change is a big change.
But what I do know is that I’ll be leaning in. I’ll be here continuing to brush the dirt off of the sacred spaces of my life.
In the last month I’ve given myself permission—freedom you might say—to think pastorally. And it’s been both exhilarating and terrifying. I am no pastor on paper, but when I allow myself to show up for you all who I write to and who I serve as a coach or now deacon as pastoral, we both come alive.
This coming Wednesday my current church is ordaining me as a deacon. I am the most resistant. I avoided setting a date for months and, finally, my pastors called me on my crap. I’m doing the work to lay down the baggage I’ve been asked to hold that tells me “ordination” is not a word for me. Even now as I write this, tears come. Tears mourning years that could have been, years I have gone unnoticed and small. Tears that are absolutely terrified of the future. And tears that are actually relieved and hopeful. It’s not me. I’m not broken. I’m not bad at knowing what I want. I’m buried. But now, after years of faithful steps forward while being held back, like a sprouted seed, I think I’m budding.
So many of you here have been important to my story. If I am the seed person in this image, I know I am held by many of you as nourishing soil. I have been challenged to stretch by some of you as gentle, life-giving rain. And I have been continuously encouraged by some of you as the warm rays of the sun.
In my story, I don’t see much of what’s held me back as malicious. I think those people maybe thought what they saw sprouting in me was a weed, and they plucked it. But thank God they’ve not ever gotten the roots.
I am so grateful for each of you who have trusted me to speak into your lives. Your trust in me are God-glimmers in my life. They are the breadcrumbs that have led me to this moment. Before I keep mixing metaphors, just know I really, really appreciate you. And I look forward to understanding what my work will look like as I continue to allow myself the freedom to think pastorally for all of you.
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