Dear Mainliners: Before You Congratulate Yourselves About Women’s Ordination,

Check the Fine Print

The SBC’s recent vote to further restrict women from serving as pastors got exactly the response you’d expect from mainline Protestants. Outrage. Disbelief. And more than a little self-congratulation as to how y’all solved this a long time ago and how well you did it.

But…what happens to women after they’re ordained? Ordination and opportunity aren’t the same thing. A denomination can ordain women for a hundred and fifty years and still systematically limit their careers. A judicatory can celebrate women in ministry while quietly steering them into the same struggling congregations, over and over. A church system can proclaim equality while the most prestigious (and well-paid) pulpits remain remarkably, reliably male.

The SBC’s restrictions are obvious. Mainline restrictions are often subtle. And, in this way, the SBC are at least honest. The Southern Baptists are arguing openly about whether women should be pastors. Many mainline denominations have moved on to a thornier question: which women get to be pastors, and where?

Researchers who study clergy careers have documented what many clergywomen already know by heart. Women are disproportionately called to congregations in crisis, in decline, in difficult transition. Career positions with limited visibility. Limited pathways. Limited futures. Meanwhile, the larger congregations, the influential ones, the ones with resources and reach, keep calling men.

The story has a predictable shape. The first call, the church that “took a chance” on a woman, often a church with many needs and few resources, becomes the church she can’t seem to leave. Her success (and in such a resource-challenged congregation, success is far less noticeable than in a well-resourced congregation) becomes the reason she can’t move. The judicatory needs her where she is. The congregation needs her. The denomination points to her as evidence that women are doing fine. Meanwhile, opportunities elsewhere somehow never materialize.

Sociologists call this role entrapment. Church dynamic consultants call it first-call syndrome. Women are told every door is open. Then they discover there are congregations no one will encourage them to pursue. Positions for which no one will advocate. Networks they were never invited to join. Mentors they never had. Conversations that happened in rooms where they weren’t present.

Officially, every door is open. Unofficially, everyone knows which doors are easier for some people to walk through.

This is why the SBC debate shouldn’t simply be a mirror for Baptists. It should be a mirror for everyone.

There are at least two ways to limit women’s ministry. One is to say: you may not serve. The other is to say: of course you may serve, but don’t waste your time with those churches, they don’t want you.

The first is easier to identify. The second is easier to deny.

Mainline churches should resist the temptation to imagine that ordination itself solves anything. The existence of women pastors isn’t the measure of equality.

The measure is whether women receive the same sponsorship, advocacy, mobility, and opportunity as their male colleagues. Who gets recommended for the flagship congregation? Who gets encouraged to apply? Who gets introduced to search committees? Who gets tapped for adjudicatory leadership? Who gets told they’re “ready” for the next challenge? Who gets told to stay put because the system needs them where they are? Who leaves parish ministry, only to hear from the adjudicatory, “Well now who am I going to find to go there?”

Many clergywomen don’t leave parish ministry because they lack a calling. They don’t leave because they lack competence or commitment. They leave because the cumulative weight of the system becomes exhausting. Years of being held to different standards. Fewer opportunities for advancement. Congregations that no one else wanted. Disproportionate emotional labor. Subtle and overt sexism, navigated quietly, year after year. And then the particular ache of watching less experienced male colleagues move into positions of greater influence, and realizing the path was always different for them.

At some point, a woman starts asking a question she never wanted to ask: Does the church she loves actually love her back?

Some discover that the very institutions that proudly celebrate women’s ordination are far less willing to sponsor, promote, or protect women once they’re ordained. The celebration was real. The infrastructure to sustain it... wasn’t. Eventually the question shifts. It’s no longer whether she’s called to ministry. It’s whether remaining in parish ministry requires sacrificing too much of herself to stay.

So yes, by all means, criticize the SBC.

But while you’re doing that, take a hard look at your own house.

Because some denominations barred women from the pulpit.

Others welcomed women into one pulpit and quietly built walls around the rest.

And if we’re honest, many of those walls are still standing.